Toxicology
Toxicology is a scientific discipline, overlapping with biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine, that involves the study of the adverse effects of chemical substances on living organisms[1] and the practice of diagnosing and treating exposures to toxins and toxicants.
The earliest treatise dedicated to the general study of plant and animal poisons, including their classification, recognition, and the treatment of their effects is the Kalpasthāna, one of the major sections of the Suśrutasaṃhitā, a Sanskrit work composed before ca.
[6][7] Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the court of the Roman emperor Nero, made an early attempt to classify plants according to their toxic and therapeutic effect.
[9] A 14th century Kannada poetic work attributed to the Jain prince Mangarasa, Khagendra Mani Darpana, describes several poisonous plants.
[10] The 16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus is considered "the father" of modern toxicology, based on his rigorous (for the time) approach to understanding the effects of substances on the body.
[12]: 30 Mathieu Orfila is also considered the modern father of toxicology, having given the subject its first formal treatment in 1813 in his Traité des poisons, also called Toxicologie générale.
[12] Examples of model organisms are Galleria mellonella,[25] which can replace small mammals, Zebrafish (Danio rerio), which allow for the study of toxicology in a lower order vertebrate in vivo[26][27] and Caenorhabditis elegans.
Major findings from the analysis of this ToxCast_STM dataset published in 2020 include: (1) 19% of 1065 chemicals yielded a prediction of developmental toxicity, (2) assay performance reached 79%–82% accuracy with high specificity (> 84%) but modest sensitivity (< 67%) when compared with in vivo animal models of human prenatal developmental toxicity, (3) sensitivity improved as more stringent weights of evidence requirements were applied to the animal studies, and (4) statistical analysis of the most potent chemical hits on specific biochemical targets in ToxCast revealed positive and negative associations with the STM response, providing insights into the mechanistic underpinnings of the targeted endpoint and its biological domain.
Several measures are commonly used to describe toxic dosages according to the degree of effect on an organism or a population, and some are specifically defined by various laws or organizational usage.
[43] Computational toxicology is a discipline that develops mathematical and computer-based models to better understand and predict adverse health effects caused by chemicals, such as environmental pollutants and pharmaceuticals.
[44] Within the Toxicology in the 21st Century project,[45][46] the best predictive models were identified to be Deep Neural Networks, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machines, which can reach the performance of in vitro experiments.
[51] A toxicologist is a scientist or medical personnel who specializes in the study of symptoms, mechanisms, treatments and detection of venoms and toxins; especially the poisoning of people.
[52] [citation needed] Bachelor's degree programs in toxicology cover the chemical makeup of toxins and their effects on biochemistry, physiology and ecology.
After introductory life science courses are complete, students typically enroll in labs and apply toxicology principles to research and other studies.
Toxicologists perform many different duties including research in the academic, nonprofit and industrial fields, product safety evaluation, consulting, public service and legal regulation.
Research projects may range from assessing the effects of toxic pollutants on the environment to evaluating how the human immune system responds to chemical compounds within pharmaceutical drugs.
