Towards a Computer Aided Toxicology

If the classical paradigm of toxicology has been used for centuries, recent toxicological findings, soaring experimental costs and an increasing regulatory pressure have led the toxicology community towards mechanistic toxicology. This new area of research, focused on molecular envents underlying the toxicity of a chemical substance, motivates the emergence of new modelling approaches for toxicology. In this chapter, we introduce a qualitative rule-based formalism inspired from BioChAM with semantics adapted to the specificities of toxicology. Using a simple example of thyroid hormone system, we then show that this formalism is able to describe the possible toxic disruptions of a biological system. We finally introduce ToxBioNet, a software platform dedicated to toxicology currently under development and we present its already implemented simulator.