Tox21BodyMap: a webtool to map chemical effects on the human body

Review of Predicting Synergistic Drug Combinations

The prediction of drug combinations is of great clinical significance. In many diseases, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and stomach ulcers, the simultaneous use of two or more drugs has shown clear efficacy. It has greatly reduced the progression of drug resistance. This review presents the latest applications of methods for predicting the effects of drug combinations and the bioactivity databases commonly used in drug combination prediction. These studies have played a significant role in developing precision therapy. We first describe the concept of synergy. we study various publicly available databases for drug combination prediction tasks. Next, we introduce five algorithms applied to drug combinatorial prediction, which include traditional machine learning methods, deep learning methods, mathematical methods, systems biology methods and search algorithms. In the end, we sum up the difficulties encountered in prediction models.

Network biology approach to human tissue-specific chemical exposome

Human exposure to environmental chemicals is a major contributor to the global disease burden. To characterize the external exposome it is important to assess its chemical components and to study their impact on human health. Biomonitoring studies measure the body burden of environmental chemicals detected in biospecimens from a wide range of the population. The detection of these chemicals in biospecimens (and, hence, human tissues) is considered an important biomarker of human exposure. However, there is no readily available resource that compiles such exposure data for human tissues from published literature, and no studies that explore the patterns in the associations between tissue-specific exposures and human diseases. We present Human Tissue-specific Exposome Atlas (TExAs), a compilation of 380 environmental chemicals detected across 27 human tissues. TExAs is accessible via a user friendly webserver: https://cb.imsc.res.in/texas. We compare the chemicals in TExAs with 55 global chemical regulations, guidelines, and inventories, which represent several categories of the external exposome of humans. Further to understand the potential implications on human health of chemicals detected across human tissues, we employ a network biology approach and explore possible chemical exposure-disease associations. Ensuing analyses reveal the possibilities of disease comorbidities and demonstrate the application of network biology in unraveling complex disease associations due to chemical exposure.

Investigating Molecular Mechanisms of Immunotoxicity and the Utility of ToxCast for Immunotoxicity Screening of Chemicals Added to Food

The development of high-throughput screening methodologies may decrease the need for laboratory animals for toxicity testing. Here, we investigate the potential of assessing immunotoxicity with high-throughput screening data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ToxCast program. As case studies, we analyzed the most common chemicals added to food as well as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) shown to migrate to food from packaging materials or processing equipment. The antioxidant preservative tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) showed activity both in ToxCast assays and in classical immunological assays, suggesting that it may affect the immune response in people. From the PFAS group, we identified eight substances that can migrate from food contact materials and have ToxCast data. In epidemiological and toxicological studies, PFAS suppress the immune system and decrease the response to vaccination. However, most PFAS show weak or no activity in immune-related ToxCast assays. This lack of concordance between toxicological and high-throughput data for common PFAS indicates the current limitations of in vitro screening for analyzing immunotoxicity. High-throughput in vitro assays show promise for providing mechanistic data relevant for immune risk assessment. In contrast, the lack of immune-specific activity in the existing high-throughput assays cannot validate the safety of a chemical for the immune system.