Data-based review of QSARs for predicting genotoxicity: the state of the art

With the aim of providing faster, more economical, animal-free tools to predict toxicity, quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) approaches are increasingly applied to the chemical risk assessment-in particular genotoxicity and carcinogenicity. The more recent period of time has witnessed refinements of the predictive systems, with the collection of larger training sets and continued fine-tuning, together with an increased interest for the use of QSAR by regulatory authorities. This literature review provides an updated snapshot of the present state of the art in the evaluation of QSAR methods as applied to genotoxicity. Overall, the abilities of software tools to predict Ames test mutagenicity were comparable with previously published evaluations, with sensitivity ranging 0.72-0.96, and specificity ranging 0.65-0.86 in applications to public data sets. These values compare quite fairly with the intrinsic variability of the Ames test. A preliminary analysis indicated a consistency with the results of the Japan Division of Genetics and Mutagenesis, National Institute of Health Sciences of Japan (DGM/NIHS) Ames/QSAR international collaborative project. Applications to a variety of external test sets pointed to the need of further improvements of the coverage/representation of the whole chemical space. Combinations of tools showed that sensitivity is usually increased at the expense of a decrease in specificity, whereas the supervision by expert judgement generated more equilibrated results. This points to the existence of a large area of context-dependent expert knowledge, which has not been formalised yet and has the potential to substantially improve the prediction systems. The overall evidence suggests that (Q)SARs for the Ames test have sufficient reliability for use in prioritisation processes as well as to support regulatory decisions in combination with other evidence. The use of highly sensitive genotoxicity QSARs in tiered integrations with other tools is suggested as a mean to shortlist chemicals for which no further testing is necessary.