New method for evaluating cancer risk of chemicals is quick, precise, inexpensive
Researchers from Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health have developed and evaluated a fast, accurate and cost-effective approach to assessing the carcinogenicity of chemicals—that is, whether exposure to a chemical increases a person’s long-term cancer risk. As a result, they have generated one of the largest toxicogenomics datasets to date, and have made the data and results publicly accessible through a web portal at carcinogenome.org.
Despite significant investments into cancer research over the last decades, approximately 1.7 million new cancer cases and 600,000 cancers deaths were estimated in the U.S. in 2017 alone. Of these, 90-95 percent were not attributable to known heritable genetic factors, making environmental exposures a major suspect in these cases.