Predictive Toxicology: Latest Scientific Developments and Their Application in Safety Assessment

Over the last decade, a number of modern in vivo and in vitro methodologies and in silico tools have been developed to investigate toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic processes of chemicals, enabling an understanding of mechanism of action at different levels of biological organization from the whole organism to organ, cellular, and molecular levels. These methodologies provide the opportunity to move toward a mechanistic understanding of toxicity, to reduce animal use in toxicologic research, and to integrate toxicology very early in the drug discovery process enabling deselection of those scaffolds and molecules carrying a high risk of failure due to adverse drug reactions.