Extraction and Annotation of Legacy Developmental Toxicity Study Data
To support the evaluation of non-animal approaches for developmental toxicity assessment, NICEATM scientists extracted information from more than 100 NTP legacy prenatal developmental toxicity animal studies and a subset of about 50 studies submitted to ECHA that were deemed high-quality by NTP subject matter experts. Study details extracted included species, strain, administration route, dosing duration, and treatment-related effects.
The extracted data were standardized by applying controlled vocabularies and ontologies to facilitate computational analyses and integration with other structured databases such as EPA's ToxRefDB. Elements of three controlled vocabularies (the Unified Medical Language coding system, the German Institute for Risk Assessment DevToxDB ontology, and the OECD Harmonised Template 74 terminologies) were combined with automation code to programmatically standardize primary source language of extracted developmental toxicology endpoints. This work aims to reduce manual labor, facilitate further analyses (e.g., systematic review, model-building, NAM validation), and uphold FAIR principles. A poster describing this work (Foster et al.) was presented at the 11th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences, and a publication is being drafted for submission in 2022.