How to Catalyze Collaboration

How do scientists figure out whether a cosmetic, food item, or industrial chemical might cause harm to humans? Well, one method to determine, say, the potential for skin irritation is to rub the product on a shaved hamster or rabbit—a test that used to be required by European regulators for some products. Fortunately for the animals, there’s now an alternative: the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework, which helps scientists understand the mechanisms by which a chemical could cause toxic effects in humans or the environment.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of researchers realized that the AOP framework could also be used to identify how the novel coronavirus caused disease. One of the key benefits of the AOP approach, write Annamaria Carusi , Laure-Alix Clerbaux , and Clemens Wittwehr , is that it provides a scaffold for assembling information from scientists across multiple disciplines.

“We like to think of the AOP approach as providing a metaphorical campfire around which people from different disciplines can assemble and construct knowledge,” write Carusi, Clerbaux, and Wittwehr, who were all involved in the project. Ultimately, the approach allowed interdisciplinary researchers “to puzzle out more than a dozen mechanisms by which the virus causes harmful effects, such as loss of smell and respiratory failure, all uploaded to an open access platform.”

Read more about how diverse scientists can synthesize information constructively.