An interactive computational toxicology platform called OrbiTox is aiming to reshape how researchers and regulators evaluate chemical safety without relying on animal testing. Developed by Sciome in collaboration with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, OrbiTox aggregates millions of experimental and predicted data points from diverse scientific domains – chemical structures, genes, biological pathways, and organisms – into a single, intuitive 3D visualization environment.
Modern chemical risk assessment increasingly depends on new approach methodologies (NAMs), including in vitro assays and in silico modeling. However, these data sources are scattered across public repositories and presented in inconsistent formats, making integrated evaluation difficult. OrbiTox fills this gap by unifying multi-domain datasets and providing fast, interactive tools for exploring relationships among chemicals, biological targets, and toxicity outcomes.
The platform includes ~900,000 curated chemical substances, 41,000 genes, 2,000 pathways, and 170+ test organisms, all connected through millions of experimental and predicted relationships. It also incorporates over 150 validated QSAR models to predict toxicity, fill data gaps, and support read-across assessments – an important component of next-generation risk assessment (NGRA).
Using a simple search interface, users can locate any chemical (including new ones via SMILES input), examine its experimental data, view similar structures, explore predicted toxicities, and generate customizable reports. OrbiTox also enables exploration of gene–pathway connections, structural and data-rich analogs, metabolite profiles, and cross-assay comparisons to streamline testing strategies of new chemicals by visualizing structural features associated with their toxicity.
OrbiTox provides a practical bridge between traditional toxicology data and robust in silico approaches, supporting the shift toward more ethical, mechanistic, and data-driven chemical safety evaluations. Additional public or proprietary data and customized in silico tools can be easily added to OrbiTox. A private version of OrbiTox secured behind an organization’s firewall is available; please contact us for more details. The platform is freely available for non-commercial use at orbitox.org. Read our recent OrbiTox publication here.
