Dr Tim Gant, HPA

will speak about

Skills for the twenty-first century chemical toxicologist

on Friday 24 February 2012

'Dose ‘em up and count the number of legs in the air in the morning'. This is still a widely held view of chemical toxicology. But it is outdated: times have changed and the modern twenty-first century chemical toxicologist now has to embrace a bewildering array of disciplines such as pathology in order to start to understand the true risk from a chemical exposure.

Central to making a valid assessment of chemical risk is an understanding of the nature of the hazard through an understanding of the mechanism of toxicity. Additionally, chemical risk cannot be assessed without understanding the toxicokinetics and likely exposure level.

Finally, toxicologists have known for a long time that rodents do not equal man (or woman). Men of course do not equal women (women have been saying it for years), although environmental estrogens just might bring an end to that. So sex differences have always been on the agenda of the chemical toxicologist. Add to this the much more difficult problem of genetics and the problem of risk assessment gets a lot more complex. Unless you have an identical twin you are unique and your response to a chemical exposure could also be unique. Until recently genetic status could be ignored, there just wasn’t enough known about genetic factors affecting susceptibility to build genetic differences into an assessment of chemical toxicity.

Times are changing. More than a decade of genomics and just a few years of high throughput sequencing have revolutionised our knowledge of ourselves. We have to build this into the risk assessment and the only way of doing this is through an understanding of chemical mechanisms of toxicity. In addition to gender and genetic factors in age, weight and health status, the variables that can affect chemical risk are diverse and complex.

A final challenge is the quite understandable societal demand to reduce the number of animals used in toxicological research and particularly risk assessment. New in vitro models such as differentiated stem cells are being developed. The chemical toxicologist needs to work out how best to use these to develop new validated models in which to pursue chemical risk assessments. The twenty-first century chemical toxicologist therefore faces a formidable challenge. The way forward is motivated multidisciplinary teams with a common objective. In this seminar we will explore skills and challenges for the twenty-first century toxicologist.

 

 

Further seminars to be held in 2012 will be announced in due course.