BY

Kayleen
Sinfellow
What Is toxicology
• It Is the study
of the adverse
effects of
chemicals on
living
organisms.
Toxicologist Study
• Conducting chemical research for military and
medical uses, such as protecting people from
radiation, chemicals and biological agents
• It is the study of symptoms, mechanisms,
treatments and detection of poisoning,
especially the poisoning of people.
• The testing evaluates the biological response
of living organisms to different routes and
durations of exposure to a substance.
 Toxicology Breakthroughs
• Toxicology's High Tech Future

• Five years ago, CNR’s Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology

(NST) department looked at its molecular toxicology group and
asked: What does the future of our field look like?
• The answer, they realized, was a shift toward “systems
biology”—that is, looking at the complex interactions of
metabolic, genetic, protein, and cellular elements with the goal
of modeling entire systems.
• Such an approach requires serious data crunching. To keep the
undergraduate curriculum up-to-date, the department turned to
adjunct professor Dale Johnson, a former vice president for
research and development at the biotech giant Chiron, and
current CEO of a biotech startup called Emiliem. Johnson
designed a course in computational toxicology to teach
students the techniques and technologies required to analyze
toxins, from pharmaceuticals in the body to chemicals in the
environment. In the lab portion of the class, students use the
heavy-duty computing power of CNR’s Geospatial Imaging and
Informatics Facility.
 Toxicology Breakthroughs

• In the wake of a toxic spill or chemical attack,

knowing which areas are contaminated and
which are not is an important part of getting
operations back to normal. MRI, as a
subcontractor to Hamilton Sundstrand for the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security,
helped engineer a mobile laboratory that can
go virtually anywhere and quickly analyze,
with tremendous precision, any type of
sample (such as plant, soil, water, air) for
contaminants. This state-of-the-art system is
called PHILIS, for Portable High-Throughput
Integrated Laboratory System, and is
designed to process 500 samples per day