The US FDA defines modified risk tobacco products (MRTPs) as products that aim to reduce harm or the risk of tobacco-related disease associated with commercially marketed tobacco products. Establishing a product’s potential as an MRTP requires scientific substantiation including toxicity studies and measures of disease risk relative to those of cigarette smoking. Best practices encourage verification of the data from such studies through sharing and open standards. Building on the experience gained from the OpenTox project, a proof-of-concept database and website (
INTERVALS) has been developed to share results from both
in vivo inhalation studies and
in vitro studies conducted by Philip Morris International R&D to assess candidate MRTPs. As datasets are often generated by diverse methods and standards, they need to be traceable, curated, and the methods used well described so that knowledge can be gained using data science principles and tools. The data-management framework described here accounts for the latest standards of data sharing and research reproducibility. Curated data and methods descriptions have been prepared in ISA-Tab format and stored in a database accessible via a search portal on the INTERVALS website. The portal allows users to browse the data by study or mechanism (e.g., inflammation, oxidative stress) and obtain information relevant to study design, methods, and the most important results. Given the successful development of the initial infrastructure, the goal is to grow this initiative and establish a public repository for 21
st-century preclinical systems toxicology MRTP assessment data and results that supports open data principles.
The US FDA defines modified risk tobacco products (MRTPs) as products that aim to reduce harm or the risk of tobacco-related disease associated with commercially marketed tobacco products. Establishing a product's potential as an MRTP requires scientific substantiation including toxicity studies and measures of disease risk relative to those of cigarette smoking. Best practices encourage verification of the data from such studies through sharing and open standards. Building on the experience gained from the OpenTox project, a proof-of-concept database and website ( ) has been developed to INTERVALS share results from both inhalation studies and studies conducted in vivo in vitro by Philip Morris International R&D to assess candidate MRTPs. As datasets are often generated by diverse methods and standards, they need to be traceable, curated, and the methods used well described so that knowledge can be gained using data science principles and tools. The data-management framework described here accounts for the latest standards of data sharing and research reproducibility. Curated data and methods descriptions have been prepared in ISA-Tab format and stored in a database accessible via a search portal on the INTERVALS website. The portal allows users to browse the data by study or mechanism (e.g., inflammation, oxidative stress) and obtain information relevant to study design, methods, and the most important results. Given the successful development of the initial infrastructure, the goal is to grow this initiative and establish a public repository for 21 -century preclinical systems toxicology MRTP assessment data and results that supports open data principles.
Summary
GladiaTOX R package is an open-source, flexible solution to high-content screening data processing and reporting in biomedical research. GladiaTOX takes advantage of the ‘tcpl’ core functionalities and provides a number of extensions: it provides a web-service solution to fetch raw data; it computes severity scores and exports ToxPi formatted files; furthermore it contains a suite of functionalities to generate PDF reports for quality control and data processing.
Availability and implementation
GladiaTOX R package (bioconductor). Also available via: git clone https://github.com/philipmorrisintl/GladiaTOX.git.
Supplementary information
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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