Evaluation of the Toxicity Forecasting Capability of EPA's ToxCast Phase I Data: Can ToxCast In Vitro Assays Predict Carcinogenicity?

Long-term rodent bioassays have played a central role in protecting human health from carcinogens; for ethical and practical reasons their use is decreasing whereas genotoxicity testing has taken a pivotal role. However, this strategy--as presently implemented--is not sensitive enough to detect all genotoxic carcinogens, and cannot detect nongenotoxic carcinogens. Among the alternative approaches under study there is the ToxCast/Tox21 project. Following a previous study from our laboratory, here we present a new, more extensive analysis of ToxCast Phase I results, indicating that at the present state-of-art this approach is not able to predict the carcinogenicity of chemicals. Possible reasons for this mediocre performance are discussed, and opinions on ways to tune up the project in the next phases are presented.