Advances in high-throughput screening technology for toxicology

Abstract

The US Tox21 collaboration utilises a quantitative high-throughput screening (qHTS) platform to efficiently profile a large number of environmental chemicals. qHTS combined with informatics facilitates chemical prioritisation for further in-depth toxicity testing and development of computational models to predict chemical toxicity. The NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC), now part of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), is a key contributor during all phases of the Tox21 collaboration, from assay development and compound screening to data analysis and model building. Since 2011, the Tox21/NCGC has been profiling the phase 2 Tox21 library of approximately 10,000 (10K) environmental chemicals and drugs. The advances in HTS assays and qHTS screens against the Tox21's and other chemical libraries are described in this review.