INSIGHTS Partner TAU has published a new paper entitled ‘A Network Toxicology Approach for Mechanistic Modelling of Nanomaterial Hazard and Adverse Outcomes’.
Hazard assessment is the first step in evaluating the potential adverse effects of chemicals. Traditionally, toxicological assessment has focused on the exposure, overlooking the impact of the exposed system on the observed toxicity. However, systems toxicology emphasizes how system properties significantly contribute to the observed response. Hence, systems theory states that interactions store more information than individual elements, leading to the adoption of network based models to represent complex systems in many fields of life sciences.
In this publication, the authors developed a network‐based approach to characterize toxicological responses in the context of a biological system, inferring biological system specific networks. The authors directly link molecular alterations to the adverse outcome pathway (AOP) framework, establishing direct connections between omics data and toxicologically relevant phenotypic events. This framework is applied to a dataset including 31 engineered nanomaterials with different physicochemical properties in two different in vitro and one in vivo models and demonstrate how the biological system is the driving force of the observed response. This work highlights the potential of network‐based methods to significantly improve their understanding of toxicological mechanisms from a systems biology perspective and provides relevant considerations and future data‐driven approaches for the hazard assessment of nanomaterials and other advanced materials.
Find the full text of the publication here.
