Strategic Design of Alternative Methods to Reduce Animal Testing

Effectopedia is an open knowledge aggregation and collaboration tool that provides a means of describing adverse outcome pathways in an encyclopedic manner. It was conceived at the International QSAR Foundation in 2006 to overcome a major technological barrier in QSAR models for predicting in vivo risks. Effectopedia was published under GPLv3 on SourceForge in August 2008 and is currently in the pre-alpha development stage. The alpha release is planned for August 2010 and the first beta release expected in December 2010.

Effectopedia will be entirely open to the public and is intended to be populated by both targeted grants as well as voluntary contributions by the scientific community.  Effectopedia has two main faces: one for users and one for contributors.  The user interface provides Wiki-like search-engine optimized articles of the adverse outcome pathways (AOP) in a relational manner.  For each AOP, a major overview Wiki article is linked to in-depth descriptions of the biological response sequences that link a chemical-induced molecular effect to the adverse outcomes needed for safety assessment.  Effectopedia will also provide threshold values or dose-response linkages between intermediate biological effects and assessment endpoints. The second interface of Effectopedia supplies tools for editing the content, building AOPs, and participating in discussions – one of the more important aspects for building new social networks among specialists.