Patent ID: 8718945

Claim:
A method of classification of toxic agents and effective countermeasures according to their mechanism of toxicity, the method comprising: recording changes in at least three different cellular parameter readouts as a result of introduction of the toxic agent in a toxicity system comprising primary human cells cultured in the presence of at least one factor activating a signaling pathway and wherein said profile comprises control data from said toxicity system lacking said agent; deriving a biological dataset profile from the changes in parameter readouts, where the biological dataset profile comprises data normalized to be a ratio of test to control data in the toxicity system under control conditions in the absence of the toxic agent, and the output from 3 or more parameters are sufficient to discriminate the mechanism of toxicity of said toxic agent; and analyzing the biological dataset profile by a multiparameter pattern recognition algorithm to quantify relatedness of the biological dataset profile to reference biological dataset profiles that include known toxic agents that target specific pathways, wherein the presence or absence of relatedness to said reference biological dataset profiles provides a classification of said agent's mechanism of toxicity; and using the classification of the agent according to its mechanism of toxicity to select an effective countermeasure agent that protects cellular pathways targeted by the toxic agent.