How tautological are interspecies correlations of carcinogenic potencies?

The Pebble Remains in the Master's Hand: Two Careers Spent Learning (Still) from John Evans

In this article, we discuss four vexing problems in risk-based decision making that John Evans has addressed over the last nearly 40 years and has perennially challenged the two of us and others to think about. We tackle the role in decision making of potential thresholds in dose-response functions, how the lack of health reference values for many chemicals may distort risk management, the challenge of model uncertainty for risk characterization, and the yet-untapped potential for value-of-information analysis to enhance public health decision making. Our theme is that work remains to be done on each of these, but that some of that work would merely involve listening to ideas that John has already offered.

Biological networks for predicting chemical hepatocarcinogenicity using gene expression data from treated mice and relevance across human and rat species

BACKGROUND

Several groups have employed genomic data from subchronic chemical toxicity studies in rodents (90 days) to derive gene-centric predictors of chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity. Genes are annotated to belong to biological processes or molecular pathways that are mechanistically well understood and are described in public databases.

OBJECTIVES

To develop a molecular pathway-based prediction model of long term hepatocarcinogenicity using 90-day gene expression data and to evaluate the performance of this model with respect to both intra-species, dose-dependent and cross-species predictions.

METHODS

Genome-wide hepatic mRNA expression was retrospectively measured in B6C3F1 mice following subchronic exposure to twenty-six (26) chemicals (10 were positive, 2 equivocal and 14 negative for liver tumors) previously studied by the US National Toxicology Program. Using these data, a pathway-based predictor model for long-term liver cancer risk was derived using random forests. The prediction model was independently validated on test sets associated with liver cancer risk obtained from mice, rats and humans.

RESULTS

Using 5-fold cross validation, the developed prediction model had reasonable predictive performance with the area under receiver-operator curve (AUC) equal to 0.66. The developed prediction model was then used to extrapolate the results to data associated with rat and human liver cancer. The extrapolated model worked well for both extrapolated species (AUC value of 0.74 for rats and 0.91 for humans). The prediction models implied a balanced interplay between all pathway responses leading to carcinogenicity predictions.

CONCLUSIONS

Pathway-based prediction models estimated from sub-chronic data hold promise for predicting long-term carcinogenicity and also for its ability to extrapolate results across multiple species.

The High Production Volume Chemical Challenge Program : The Rodent LD50 and its Possible Replacement

The High Production Volume Chemical Challenge Program provides an opportunity to re-examine the usefulness and informational value of tests currently used to obtain preliminary hazard identification data. With a view to assessing the mechanistic information provided by the rodent LD50 test and to ascertain the possibility of replacing it with other "more acceptable" assays, we used a recently developed approach to determine the relationship of the LD50 assay to other toxicological protocols. Our analyses indicate that, of the assays examined, the LD50 was significantly related to toxicity in cultured cells and to binding at the Ah receptor.

Regulatory cancer risk assessment based on a quick estimate of a benchmark dose derived from the maximum tolerated dose

The proposed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency carcinogen risk assessment guidelines employ a benchmark dose as a point of departure (POD) for low-dose risk assessment. If information on the carcinogenic mode of action for a chemical supports a nonlinear dose-response curve below the POD, a margin-of-exposure ratio between the POD and anticipated human exposure would be considered. The POD would be divided by uncertainty (safety) factors to arrive at a reference dose that is likely to produce no, or at most negligible, cancer risk for humans. If nonlinearity below the POD is not supported by sufficient evidence, then linear extrapolation from the incidence at the POD to zero would be used for low-dose cancer risk estimation. The carcinogen guidelines suggest that the lower 95% confidence limit on the dose estimated to produce an excess of tumors in 10% of the animals (LTD10) be used for the POD. Due to the relatively narrow range of doses in 2-year rodent bioassays and the limited range of statistically significant tumor incidence rates, the estimate of the LTD10 obtained from 2-year bioassays is constrained to a relatively narrow range of values. Because of this constraint, a simple, quick, and relatively precise determination of the LTD10 can be obtained by the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) divided by 7. All that is needed is a 90-day study to establish the MTD. It is shown that the LTD10 determined by this relatively easy procedure is generally within a factor of 10 of the LTD10 that would be estimated using tumor incidence rates from 2-year bioassays. Estimates of cancer potency from replicated 2-year bioassays, and hence estimates of cancer risk, have been show to vary by a factor of 4 around a median value. Thus, there may be little gain in precision of cancer risk estimates derived from a 2-year bioassay, compared to the estimate based on the MTD from a 90-day study. If the anticipated human exposure were estimated to be small relative to the MTD/7 = LTD10, there may be little value in conducting a chronic 2-year study in rodents because the estimate of cancer risk would be low regardless of the results of a 2-year bioassay. Linear extrapolation to a risk of less than 1 in 100,000 and use of an uncertainty factor, e.g., of 10,000, would give the same regulatory "safe dose." Linear extrapolation to a virtually safe dose associated with a cancer risk estimate of less than one in a million would be 10 times lower than the reference dose based on the LTD10/10,000.

What do animal cancer tests tell us about human cancer risk?: Overview of analyses of the carcinogenic potency database

Many important issues in carcinogenesis can be addressed using our Carcinogenic Potency Database, which analyzes and standardizes the literature of chronic carcinogenicity tests in laboratory animals. This review is an update and overview of our analyses during the past 15 years, using the current database that includes results of 5152 experiments on 1298 chemicals. We address the following: 1. More than half the 1298 chemicals tested in long-term experiments have been evaluated as carcinogens. We describe this positivity rate for several subsets of the data (including naturally occurring and synthetic chemicals), and we hypothesize and important role in the interpretation of results for increased cell division due to administration of high doses. 2. Methodological issues in the interpretation of animal cancer tests: constraints on the estimation of carcinogenic potency and validity problems associated with using the limited data from bioassays to estimate human risk, reproducibility of results in carcinogenesis bioassays, comparison of lifetable and summary methods of analysis, and summarizing carcinogenic potency when multiple experiments on a chemical are positive. 3. Positivity is compared in bioassays for two closely related species, rats and mice, tested under similar experimental conditions. We assess what information such a comparison can provide about interspecies extrapolation. 4. Rodent carcinogens induce tumors in 35 different target organs. We describe the frequency of chemicals that induce tumors in rats or mice at each target site, and we compare target sites of mutagenic and nonmutagenic rodent carcinogens. 5. A broad perspective on evaluation of possible cancer hazards from rodent carcinogens is given, by ranking 74 human exposures (natural and synthetic) on the HERP indes.

On interspecies correlations of carcinogenic potencies

It has been established in the literature that constraints on the designs of experiments used to estimate carcinogenic potencies cause overestimation of true biological interspecies correlations of such potencies. This article explores the potential for appreciable underestimation of interspecies correlations, due to the experimental error that occurs in the estimation of carcinogenic potencies.

The performance of short-term tests in identifying potential germ cell mutagens: a qualitative and quantitative analysis

A retrospective analysis was undertaken to assess the performance of selected short-term tests in the discrimination of mammalian germ cell mutagens and nonmutagens using data derived from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency/International Agency for Research on Cancer Genetic Activity Profile (EPA/IARC GAP) and EPA GENE-TOX databases. The short-term tests selected were gene mutation in Salmonella (S. typhimurium), cultured mammalian cell gene mutation and chromosomal aberrations, and mammalian bone marrow cytogenetics (micronucleus and chromosomal aberrations). These are the first level tests used in the EPA mutagenicity testing guidelines. The results of this analysis showed good sensitivity of short-term in vitro tests for mammalian cell gene mutation (96%) or chromosomal aberrations (92%) in identifying germ cell mutagens, while the sensitivity of tests for gene mutation in S. typhimurium was lower (79%). Bone marrow micronucleus or chromosomal aberration assays in vivo each displayed a sensitivity of 96%. Thus, both the in vitro and in vivo tests may be used effectively to screen chemicals for potential germ cell mutagenicity. In contrast, the in vitro tests mentioned above performed poorly in discriminating putative germ cell nonmutagens, giving results for specificity at or below what is expected due to chance alone (50-11%). The bone marrow assays were more efficient in this regard, the micronucleus test yielding a specificity of 63% and the chromosomal aberrations assay 64%. The mouse bone marrow micronucleus test also performed well on a quantitative basis, responding at or below the lowest effective doses tested in the mouse dominant lethal assay. Regression analysis of the mean lowest effective doses of chemicals evaluated in vivo showed approximately 1:1 linear correlations for mouse germ cell assays (heritable translocation vs dominant lethal or specific locus tests) as well as for mouse bone marrow assays (micronucleus vs chromosomal aberration). The results suggest the value of the bone marrow micronucleus test as an assay for potential germ cell mutagenicity and the dominant lethal test as a relatively inexpensive choice for confirmation of germ cell damage. The sensitivity of the in vitro assays investigated and the discriminatory capability of the in vivo bone marrow assay affirmed the utility of these tests within the framework of the EPA mutagenicity testing guidelines.