Defining and Controlling Exposure During In Vitro Toxicity Testing and the Potential of Passive Dosing

Toxicity testing using in vitro bioassays is assuming an increasingly important role. Nevertheless, several issues remain with regard to their proper application, which mainly relate to the proper definition and control of the test chemical(s) concentrations to which the cells or tissues are exposed. This has fundamental implications for understanding the underlying relationship between the in vitro exposure regime and response, and leads to uncertainty in the resulting bioassay data. This chapter covers the definition and control of exposure of hydrophobic organic chemicals (HOCs) in in vitro bioassays aimed at measuring their toxicity. A review of the fate of HOCs in typical in vitro set-ups is followed by a discussion of how to define the test exposure. Currently applied approaches for introducing HOCs into in vitro bioassays are then related to these different definitions of test exposure. Finally, passive dosing as one possible approach for giving defined and constant dissolved concentrations of HOCs in in vitro toxicity tests is introduced, using examples taken from the literature, and how this might be better integrated into high throughput in vitro toxicity testing is discussed.