Welcome to the OpenTox Community site

Welcome to the OpenTox community site. The goal of OpenTox is to provide a predictive toxicology framework and services providing users a unified access to distributed toxicological resources including data, computer models, validation and reporting.

OpenTox has been initiated as a collaborative project involving a combination of different enterprise, university and government research groups to design and build the initial OpenTox framework.  Additionally numerous organizations with industry, regulatory or expert interests are being included from the start in providing guidance and direction.  The goal is to expand OpenTox as a community project enabling additional expert and user participants to be involved in developments in as timely a manner as possible. To this end, our mission is to carry out developments in an open and transparent manner from the early days of the project, and to open up discussions and development to the global community at large, who may either participate in developments or provide user perspectives.  Cooperation on data standards, data integration, ontologies, integration of algorithm predictions from different methods, and testing and validation all have significant collaboration opportunities and benefits for the community. 

OpenTox is working to meet the requirements of the REACH legislation using alternative testing methods to contribute to the reduction of animal experiments for toxicity testing. It adheres and supports the OECD Guidelines for (Q)SAR Validation and incorporates the QSAR Model Reporting Format (QMRF) from the European Chemicals Bureau (ECB).

Relevant international authorities (e.g., ECB, ECVAM, US EPA, US FDA) and industry organisations participate actively in the advisory board of the OpenTox project and provide input for the continuing development of requirement definitions and standards for data, knowledge and model exchange.

OpenTox will actively support the development and validation of (Q)SAR models and algorithms by improving the interoperability between individual systems (common standards for data and model exchange), increasing the reproducibility of QSAR models (by providing common source of structures, toxicity data and algorithms) and by providing scientifically sound and easy-to-use validation routines. For this reason it is likely that the development cycle will speed up for (Q)SAR models and algorithms which will lead to improved and more reliable results. As OpenTox offers all of these features also for external developers and researchers we expect an international impact that can benefit many projects.