"It holds great promise for the future," says Jay Goodman, a Michigan State University toxicologist. "Toxicogenomics is a tool that can improve the assessment of potential toxicity." Phil Iannaccone, a researcher at Northwestern University Medical School and invited author of a recent Environmental Health Perspective editorial on the new technology,1 agrees: "The hope is that the observed patterns will be characteristic of a class of toxicants, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons versus peroxysome proliferators. Eventually one might hope for specificity allowing actual identification of the chemical," he says. "For now it is exciting enough that one might be able to determine if an unknown chemical is likely to behave as a certain class of toxicants or not."
The new field is based on the premise that tumors, disease, and other physical responses to toxic chemicals find their origins in gene expression, which depends on the environment—chemical or otherwise. Determining how ...
