CATMoS: Collaborative Acute Toxicity Modeling Suite
Background: Humans are exposed to tens of thousands of chemical substances that need to be assessed for their potential toxicity. Acute systemic toxicity testing serves as the basis for regulatory hazard classification, labeling, and risk management. However, it is cost- and time-prohibitive to evaluate all new and existing chemicals using traditional rodent acute toxicity tests. In silico models built using existing data facilitate rapid acute toxicity predictions without using animals. Objectives: The U.S. Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods Acute Toxicity Workgroup organized an international collaboration to develop in silico models for predicting acute oral toxicity based on five different endpoints: LD50 value, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hazard categories, Globally Harmonized System for Classification and Labelling hazard categories, very toxic chemicals (LD50 =50 mg/kg), and non-toxic chemicals (LD50 >2000 mg/kg). Methods: An acute oral toxicity data inventory for 11,992 chemicals was compiled, split into training and evaluation sets, and made available to 35 participating international research groups that submitted a total of 139 predictive models. Predictions that fell within the applicability domains of the submitted models were evaluated using external validation sets. These were then combined into consensus models to leverage strengths of individual approaches. Results: The resulting consensus predictions, which leverage the collective strengths of each individual model, form the Collaborative Acute Toxicity Modeling Suite (CATMoS). CATMoS demonstrated high performance in terms of accuracy and robustness when compared to in vivo results. Discussion: CATMoS is being evaluated by regulatory agencies for its utility and applicability as a potential replacement for in vivo rat acute oral toxicity studies. CATMoS predictions for over 800,000 chemicals have been made available via the NTP’s Integrated Chemical Environment. The models are also implemented in a free, standalone open-source tool, OPERA, which allows predictions of new and untested chemicals to be made.