The SEURAT-1 (Safety Evaluation Ultimately Replacing Animal Testing-1) research cluster is comprised of seven EU FP7 Health projects and is co-financed by Cosmetics Europe. The aim is to generate a proof-of-concept to show how the latest in vitro and in silico technologies, systems toxicology and toxicogenomics can be combined to deliver a test replacement for repeated dose systemic toxicity testing on animals. The SEURAT-1 strategy is to adopt a mode-of-action framework to describe repeated dose toxicity to derive predictions of in vivo toxicity responses.
ToxBank is the cross-cluster infrastructure project whose activities include the development of a data warehouse to provide a web-accessible shared repository of research data and protocols.
Experiments are generating dose response data over multiple timepoints using different omics platforms including transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenetics over a variety of different cell lines and a common set of reference compounds. Experimental data is also being generated from functional assays and bioreactors, and supplemented with in silico approaches including kinetic information. This complex and heterogeneous data is being consolidated and harmonized through the ToxBank data warehouse. It is being organized in order to perform an integrated data analysis and ultimately predict repeated dose systemic toxicity.
Core technologies used include the ISA-Tab universal data exchange format, Representational State Transfer (REST) web services, the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OpenTox standards. We describe the design of the data warehouse based on cluster requirements, the implementation based on open standards, and illustrate using a data analysis case study.