ABSTRACT
The rapid evolution of bioinformatics applications in toxicology, together with game-changing advances in molecular profiling technologies, such as deep sequencing, has led to computational biology becoming a core component of toxicology study design, analysis, and interpretation. The advent of large-scale mammalian genome sequencing and the development of genome-wide “omic” profiling technologies in the late 1990s, in particular transcriptomics, offered the opportunity to screen simultaneously the state of thousands of molecular entities of a biological system. This chapter outlines some current computational biology applications in drug safety assessment, illustrating the diversity of tools and resources that are being deployed as well as some of the current challenges and future opportunities in this rapidly evolving field. In addition to characterizing drug target biology across species under normal (baseline) conditions, “omic”-data can also be used to address a variety of questions relating to drug-mediated biological responses.
