What kind of research is EPA doing in computational toxicology?
EPA has increased research activities in computational toxicology over the past four years. Research efforts are using genomics, proteomics and metabonomics to better understand the molecular and cellular pathways that chemicals affect as they damage various organs. Additional research is exploring tools used by the pharmaceutical industry in order to see if they are appropriate for screening large numbers of chemicals for biological activity. Finally, EPA is promoting the digitization of and electronic access to the wealth of toxicological information in existence, so that researchers and risk assessors will be better able to search for information and detect patterns of toxicity in the databases.
