On the importance of choosing relevant biological endpoints to predict nanoparticle toxicity with computational approaches for human health risk assessment

2019 
Because it is impossible to assess in vitro or in vivo the toxicity of all nanoparticles available on the market on a case-by-case basis, computational approaches have been proposed as useful alternatives to predict in silico the hazard potential of engineered nanoparticles. Despite promising results, a major issue associated with these mathematical models lies in the a priori choice of the physico-chemical descriptors and the biological endpoints. We performed a thorough bibliographic survey on the biological endpoints used for nanotoxicology purposes and compared them between experimental and computational approaches. They were found to be disparate: while conventional in vitro nanotoxicology assays usually investigate a large array of biological effects using eukaryotic cells (cytotoxicity, pro-inflammatory response, oxidative stress, genotoxicity), computational studies mostly focus on cell viability and also includes studies on prokaryotic cells. We may thus wonder the relevance of building complex m...
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