NIEHS News: Two new papers describe publicly accessible web-based tools for exploring environmental chemicals and predicting their risk. These resources will help health policymakers to make faster and more accurate decisions about chemical safety and the need for remediation efforts.
The Conditional Toxicity Value (CTV) Predictor, was described in the May issue of Environmental Health Perspectives. The tool's web portal allows users to rapidly obtain chemical toxicity values, which are predicted using a collection of statistical models.
The second tool was reported May 22 in the journal Bioinformatics. The ChemMaps.comwebserver allows users to easily browse, navigate, and mine chemical space. ChemMaps.com includes DrugMap, which lists more than 8,000 drugs, and EnvMap, which lists more than 47,000 chemicals of relevance to NIEHS and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
"For environmental chemicals, we can now visualize the areas of chemical space where we have safety data and where there are clusters of toxic or nontoxic chemicals," said Nicole Kleinstreuer, Ph.D., co-author of the ChemMaps study. Kleinstreuer is the deputy director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP) Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM).
"[This will] facilitate green chemistry applications, help prioritize allocation of testing resources, and allow predictions on new chemicals," she explained.
Source: https://factor.niehs.nih.gov/2018/7/science-highlights/chemical_risk/index.htm
