ELIXIR and Toxicology: a community in development [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]

• Published in: F1000Research
• Main Authors: Evan E. Bolton, Haralambos Sarimveis, Egon L. Willighagen, Hervé Ménager, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Nina Jeliazkova, Antony J. Williams, Sirarat Sarntivijai, Emma L. Schymanski, Rob Stierum, Karel Berka, Pascal Kahlem, Jos Bessems, Pavel Babica, Montserrat Cases, Ludek Blaha, Hristo Aladjov, Reza Aalizadeh, Karine Audouze, Kasia Arturi, Alasdair Gray, Roland Grafström, Daan P. Geerke, Henner Hollert, Ola Spjuth, John M. Hancock, Kirtan Dave, Dimitrios Ε. Damalas, Thomas Exner, Marco Dilger, Boï Kone, Todor Kondic, Uko Maran, Steffen Neumann, Iseult Lynch, Fabien Jourdan, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Ferran Sanz, Danyel Jennen, Jos Kleinjans, Jana Klanova, Reza M. Salek, Sylvie Remy, Tobias Schulze, Brett Sallach, Penny Nymark, Sergio Martinez Cuesta, Noelia Ramirez, Herbert Oberacher, Craig E. Wheelock, Gerard J.P. van Westen, Barbara Zdrazil, Hilda Witters, Jonathan Tedds, Marvin Martens, Jaroslav Slobodnik, Ralf J.M. Weber, Nikolaos Thomaidis, Anže Županič, Chris T. Evelo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: F1000 Research Ltd 2023-10-01
• Subjects: Toxicology; ELIXIR; interoperability; FAIR; eng
• Online Access: https://f1000research.com/articles/10-1129/v2

Toxicology has been an active research field for many decades, with academic, industrial and government involvement. Modern omics and computational approaches are changing the field, from merely disease-specific observational models into target-specific predictive models. Traditionally, toxicology has strong links with other fields such as biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine. With the rise of synthetic and new engineered materials, alongside ongoing prioritisation needs in chemical risk assessment for existing chemicals, early predictive evaluations are becoming of utmost importance to both scientific and regulatory purposes. ELIXIR is an intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe. To coordinate the linkage of various life science efforts around modern predictive toxicology, the establishment of a new ELIXIR Community is seen as instrumental. In the past few years, joint efforts, building on incidental overlap, have been piloted in the context of ELIXIR. For example, the EU-ToxRisk, diXa, HeCaToS, transQST, and the nanotoxicology community have worked with the ELIXIR TeSS, Bioschemas, and Compute Platforms and activities. In 2018, a core group of interested parties wrote a proposal, outlining a sketch of what this new ELIXIR Toxicology Community would look like. A recent workshop (held September 30th to October 1st, 2020) extended this into an ELIXIR Toxicology roadmap and a shortlist of limited investment-high gain collaborations to give body to this new community. This Whitepaper outlines the results of these efforts and defines our vision of the ELIXIR Toxicology Community and how it complements other ELIXIR activities.