Right now, no one has really used the technique to predict the toxicity of a chemical. A computer, without knowing the identity of the chemicals, could group them by type of toxicity. A paper is appearing in the December edition of the journal Toxicological Sciences. Phase-1 found 260 genes that were differentially activated in people allergic to penicillin compared with those not allergic. It has put 20 of those genes with the strongest correlation on a chip that it is considering selling as a penicillin allergy test.
Drug companies are the most enthusiastic users of toxicogenomics.
Many clinical trials fail because patients suffer harmful side effects that are not detected in earlier animal tests. And in the last three years, several drugs that were already on the market were removed because they caused harm. Drug companies typically screen millions of compounds as potential drug candidates. Tularik, a biotechnology company in South San Francisco, Calif., was examining several drug candidates, one of which it knew was toxic. So it compared the others with the toxic one to help eliminate other toxic ones, said Andrew Pearlman, executive vice president.