HESI members present at the World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences.
World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences
August 27, 2023 – August 31, 2023
Niagara Falls, Canada
The mission of HESI’s Emerging Systems Toxicology for the Assessment of Risk (eSTAR) Committee is to develop and deliver innovative systems toxicology approaches for risk assessment. The committee aims to catalyze adoption of new translational and predictive tools that guide decision-making based on mechanistic understanding of toxicological response.
This Working Group has compiled a broad membership of experts across sectors and chemical classes to write a recently accepted manuscript on the state of the science on the use and potential applications of transcriptomic PODs. Future work will include discussion of bioinformatic methods to derive transcriptomic PODs.
A manuscript was accepted describing the group’s strategy to create transcriptomic biomarkers for particular pathways leading to rat tumors. Current work is to derive and refine the biomarkers. There is also planned experimental work to see gene expression difference in wild type and knock out rats in response to reference compounds.
Designed and launched a multi-site experimental program on the use of exosomal miRNAs expressed in response to renal toxicants.
The HESI eSTAR committee is proud to announce that it was awarded a $250,000 USD grant (U01) as part of the USFDA’s Biomarker Qualification Program in June 2022. This funding will be partnered with Committee resources to support a four-site ring trial generating additional data on the TGx-DDI (TGx = toxicogenomics; DDI = DNA damage inducing) biomarker. The TgX-DDI biomarker is currently under review by the FDA as part of the FDA Biomarker Qualification program. Pending the results of this final study, the marker is anticipated to gain FDA approval for optional use as added weight of evidence in the assessment of genotoxicity. The marker has the potential to improve upon the low specificity of in vitro chromosome damage assays used in current testing and to aid drug development by providing mechanistic insights into transcriptional changes occurring in genes involved in key DNA damage pathways.
Learn more about the use of the TGx-DDI transcriptomic biomarker for the genotoxicity assessment of data-poor chemicals here (poster presented at the 2021 EMGS Virtual Annual Meeting by Anne-Marie Fortin, University of Ottawa).
A manuscript on DNA de-modification analysis of clinical tumor samples was accepted; the project will sunset after an educational webinar.
This newly formed group is planning a proof of concept study to see if Cell Painting data (with or without transcriptomic data) can be predictive of existing rat liver data.
This newly formed group is exploring the use of error corrected sequencing to detect clonal expansion of non-genotoxic carcinogens.
The HESI eSTAR committee is proud to announce that it was awarded a $250,000 USD grant (U01) as part of the USFDA’s Biomarker Qualification Program in June 2022. This funding will be partnered with Committee resources to support a four-site ring trial generating additional data on the TGx-DDI (TGx = toxicogenomics; DDI = DNA damage inducing) biomarker. The TgX-DDI biomarker is currently under review by the FDA as part of the FDA Biomarker Qualification program. Pending the results of this final study, the marker is anticipated to gain FDA approval for optional use as added weight of evidence in the assessment of genotoxicity. The marker has the potential to improve upon the low specificity of in vitro chromosome damage assays used in current testing and to aid drug development by providing mechanistic insights into transcriptional changes occurring in genes involved in key DNA damage pathways.
US Environmental Protection Agency
GlaxoSmithKline
August 27, 2023 – August 31, 2023
Niagara Falls, Canada
HESI members present at the World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences.
April 18, 2023
eSTAR, Webinar
Please join us for an upcoming webinar, organized by the HESI Emerging Systems Toxicology for the Assessment of Risk (eSTAR) Committee: Presentation by Dr. Jurek Kozyra from Nanovery.
March 19, 2023 – March 23, 2023
Nashville, TN, USA
A number of HESI committees will have presentations and posters at the Society of Toxicology Meeting in Nashville, TN.
February 23, 2023
eSTAR, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Webinar Series
The eSTAR committee will be presenting as part of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Webinar Series called "Tomorrow's Data, Today: Sunsetting the 2-year Carcinogenicity Assay".
February 21, 2023
eSTAR, Webinar
Please join us for an upcoming webinar, organized by the HESI Emerging Systems Toxicology for the Assessment of Risk (eSTAR) Committee: Dr. Leah Wehmas (United States Environmental Protection Agency) will present work from the eSTAR FFPE Project.
November 3, 2022 – November 4, 2022
eSTAR Committee Annual Meeting, Virtual
The goals of the eSTAR Annual Meeting will be to communicate updates from the various working groups and listen to talks from leading experts in systems toxicology. On the second day we will have two concurrent half-day sessions for our newest projects, Error Correcting Sequencing and Cell Painting. The entire meeting is free and ...
BMC Genomics, 2016
MicroRNAs (miRNA) are ~19-25 nucleotide long RNA molecules that fine tune gene expression through the inhibition of translation or degradation of the mRNA through incorporation into the RNA induced silencing complex (RISC). MicroRNAs are stable in the serum and plasma, are detectable in a wide variety of ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017
Interpretation of positive genotoxicity findings using the current in vitro testing battery is a major challenge to industry and regulatory agencies. These tests, especially mammalian cell assays, have high sensitivity but suffer from low specificity, leading to high rates of irrelevant positive findings (i.e., positive ...
Toxicological Sciences, 2017
Archival formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples offer a vast but largely untapped resource for genomic research. The primary technical issues limiting use of FFPE samples are RNA yield and quality. In this study, we evaluated methods to demodify RNA highly fragmented and crosslinked by formalin fixation. ...
BMC Genomics, 2018
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate gene expression and have been targeted as indicators of environmental/toxicologic stressors. Using the data from our deep sequencing of miRNAs in an extensive sampling of rat tissues, we developed a database called RATEmiRs for the Rat Atlas of Tissue-specific and Enriched miRNAs to allow users to ...
Frontiers in Big Data, 2019
Genotoxicity testing is an essential component of the safety assessment paradigm required by regulatory agencies world-wide for analysis of drug candidates, and environmental and industrial chemicals. Current genotoxicity testing batteries feature a high incidence of irrelevant positive findings – particularly for in ...
Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, 2019
Robust genomic approaches are now available to realize improvements in efficiencies and translational relevance of cancer risk assessments for drugs and chemicals. The authors propose a path for implementation of innovative cancer risk assessment including incorporating genomic signatures to assess mechanistic relevance ...
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