TRC: Mission Accomplished

Abstract

Toxicogenomics is no longer in its infancy. The field is poised to make significant contributions to risk assessment, drug screening and development, clinical diagnosis and therapy, and policy decision making. That was the general consensus that emerged from the final meeting of the Toxicogenomics Research Consortium (TRC), a multicenter collaborative initiative established by the NIEHS in 2001 to serve as an extramural arm of the institute’s National Center for Toxicogenomics (NCT). The conference, “Empowering Environmental Health Sciences Research with New Technologies,” was held 4–6 December 2006 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and was sponsored by the NIEHS, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) Center for Environmental Health and Susceptibility, the UNC-CH Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Agilent Technologies, which manufactures microarrays along with other measurement tools. The meeting included presentations from grantees in two other recent efforts to support the development of applications of the “omics” technologies: the NIEHS Functional Proteomics Initiative, which was established in 2002, and the NIEHS/NIAAA Metabolomics Initiative, a consortium started in 2005 by the NIEHS and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The conference began with a symposium recognizing the contributions to the field of toxicogenomics by the NCT and its director, Raymond Tennant. Tennant championed what has proven to be a vital concept in toxicogenomics: “phenotypic anchoring,” or the idea that the results of microarray experiments must be associated with particular phenotypes to be of informative value. Richard Paules, a senior scientist in the NIEHS Laboratory of Molecular Toxicology, elaborates: “In order to understand the plethora of gene expression changes, where you’ve got five or ten thousand changes in a particular response [or] disease state, . . . it’s important to make a correlation, a link between a particular biological event and a group of gene expression changes. The linkage can then be tested, and subsequent experiments conducted in a hypothesis-driven manner.”