Abstract
The exponential growth of the Internet of Things and the global popularity and remarkable decline in cost of the mobile phone is driving the digital transformation of medical practice. The rapidly maturing digital, non-medical world of mobile (wireless) devices, cloud computing and social networking is coalescing with the emerging digital medical world of omics data, biosensors and advanced imaging which offers the increasingly realistic prospect of personalized medicine. Described as a potential “seismic” shift from the current “healthcare” model to a “wellness” paradigm that is predictive, preventative, personalized and participatory, this change is based on the development of increasingly sophisticated biosensors which can track and measure key biochemical variables in people. Additional key drivers in this shift are metabolomic and proteomic signatures, which are increasingly being reported as pre-symptomatic, diagnostic and prognostic of toxicity and disease. These advancements also have profound implications for toxicological evaluation and safety assessment of pharmaceuticals and environmental chemicals. An approach based primarily on human in vivo and high-throughput in vitro human cell-line data is a distinct possibility. This would transform current chemical safety assessment practice which operates in a human “data poor” to a human “data rich” environment. This could also lead to a seismic shift from the current animal-based to an animal-free chemical safety assessment paradigm.
Highlights
In a paper titled “The feasibility of replacing animal testing for assessing consumer safety: a suggested future direction” Fentem et al (2004) discussed how the new “omics” technologies; genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabonomics could be used in the future to replace animal-based data in human chemical safety assessment
A major impediment to progress was that much of these data were generated in a clinical setting and not in abundance in the public domain. They recommended that making these data and information generally accessible in an ethical and legal way, could lead to the translation of experimental non-animal data that could be used in safety assessment (Fentem et al, 2004)
In this review the components that could bring about an animal-free chemical safety assessment paradigm are discussed
Summary
In a paper titled “The feasibility of replacing animal testing for assessing consumer safety: a suggested future direction” Fentem et al (2004) discussed how the new “omics” technologies; genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabonomics could be used in the future to replace animal-based data in human chemical safety assessment. Open Access in publishing (Bains, 2009), Open Source Initiative in software development, Open Source engineered human tissue models (De Wever et al, 2015), the Open Phacts Foundation (Williams et al, 2012) and the need for multi-disciplinary approaches to the access, integration and analysis of big data sets (Schumacher et al, 2014; Alyass et al, 2015) has led to a burgeoning of collaborative research2 This in turn has led to the proliferation of publicly available databases that include omics data for human disease, as well as survey and clinical assay data on human exposure and health outcomes (Zhu et al, 2008; Sakurai et al, 2011; Kim et al, 2012; Kotera et al, 2012; Kamburov et al, 2013; Wachter and Beissbarth, 2015). In this review the components that could bring about an animal-free chemical safety assessment paradigm are discussed
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