Toxicity Forecasting (ToxCast)

Accessible Bioactivity Data for Toxicology

"ToxCast" overlayed onto a graph with a dose-response curve. The background has rows and columns of circles representing a well plate. The foreground has a magnifying glass through which a DNA helix can be seen.

What is ToxCast?

US EPA's Toxicity Forecaster (ToxCast) program makes in vitro medium- and high-throughput screening assay data publicly available for prioritization and hazard characterization of thousands of chemicals. Assays employ a variety of technologies to evaluate the effects of chemical exposure on diverse biological targets for almost 10,000 substances. ToxCast data is aggregated from 20+ assay sources, including the Toxicology in the 21st Century federal agency collaboration (TOX21) program.

What Does ToxCast Do?

The ToxCast Pipeline utilizes open-source R packages (tcpl, tcplfit2, and ctxR) to store, manage, curve-fit, and visualize data and populate its relational database, invitrodb. Once data has been generated by various labs and processed by EPA with tcpl, users can explore ToxCast via the CompTox Chemicals Dashboard, CTX APIs, and data downloads.  

Additional Resources

Why is ToxCast Useful?

ToxCast provides a standard for consistent and reproducible data processing for diverse, targeted bioactivity assay data with readily available documentation and a unified FAIR software approach. In fact, EPA's Endocrine D isruption Screening Program (EDSP) is working to use ToxCast to identify priority chemicals.

As part of EPA’s commitment to gather and share its chemical data in open and transparent ways, all ToxCast chemical data is publicly available.