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Review
. 2025 Feb;26(2):105-122.
doi: 10.1038/s41576-024-00767-1. Epub 2024 Sep 2.

Progress in toxicogenomics to protect human health

Matthew J Meier  1 , Joshua Harrill  2 , Kamin Johnson  3 , Russell S Thomas  2 , Weida Tong  4   5 , Julia E Rager  5   6   7   8 , Carole L Yauk  9
Affiliations
Review

Progress in toxicogenomics to protect human health

Matthew J Meier et al. Nat Rev Genet. 2025 Feb.

Abstract

Toxicogenomics measures molecular features, such as transcripts, proteins, metabolites and epigenomic modifications, to understand and predict the toxicological effects of environmental and pharmaceutical exposures. Transcriptomics has become an integral tool in contemporary toxicology research owing to innovations in gene expression profiling that can provide mechanistic and quantitative information at scale. These data can be used to predict toxicological hazards through the use of transcriptomic biomarkers, network inference analyses, pattern-matching approaches and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, emerging approaches, such as high-throughput dose-response modelling, can leverage toxicogenomic data for human health protection even in the absence of predicting specific hazards. Finally, single-cell transcriptomics and multi-omics provide detailed insights into toxicological mechanisms. Here, we review the progress since the inception of toxicogenomics in applying transcriptomics towards toxicology testing and highlight advances that are transforming risk assessment.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

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