“RapidTox”: A decision-support workflow to inform rapid toxicity and human health assessment

Abstract

Regulatory bodies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are consistently faced with decisions pertaining to potential human health impacts of a diverse landscape of chemicals encountered in exposure matrices such as water, air, and soil. For legacy chemicals or those currently in commerce, decision contexts may range from emergency response to disasters where evaluation of potential threats to human health occurs on the order of hours to days, up to site- or media-specific assessment and remediation over the course of months to years. In addition, screening and prioritization of new chemicals or emerging contaminants represents an ever-present focus area for the regulatory community. A common theme across these overarching decision contexts is the need for assembling and integrating human health relevant data such as toxicity values and associated effects information. Various activities ranging from screening and prioritization to human health risk assessment of chemicals have historically been time and resource intensive, often requiring that practitioners consult and review a variety of disparate data streams to inform a given decision. In addition, many environmental chemicals are ‘data-poor’, lacking sufficient hazard data or toxicity values applicable to a given exposure scenario. In response, decision-based workflows have been developed and deployed in the RapidTox online platform wherein available toxicity values, hazard/effects data, physicochemical properties, and new approach methods-based data (e.g., read-across; cell-based bioactivity) have been assembled into data delivery modules. To date, the user interface design and expertly scoped content have been integrated in ‘screening human health assessment’ or ‘emergency response’ workflows to support decision-making.