Crowdsourcing Toxicity Prediction
BRITT ERICKSON · Chemical & Engineering News · 2013
A unique competition is under way to encourage computationally minded people to develop new models for predicting the toxicity of chemicals. The goal is to crowdsource the analysis of large sets of in vitro toxicity data to determine whether chemical toxicity can be inferred from genomic and chemical structure information. The idea is to put large data sets in the public domain “to see if multiple groups working on the same problem can do a more effective job of answering a question than one individual group could do on its own,” says Lara Mangravite, a principal scientist at Seattle-based Sage Bionetworks who is managing the competition. Attempts to develop models for predicting toxicity have been slow up until now, and such models haven’t been very effective. Contest organizers plan to place all of the data and the resulting models developed during the competition into an open commons so investigators can ...