Evidence-based Toxicology

Quality control is a very important aspect of not only modern toxicology but the entirety of life sciences. The first lesson in this module demonstrates the importance of performing quality control on your experiments. The second lesson is connected with the first one because validation of an alternative method requires highly standardized protocols and quality control at each step. This lesson teaches you different aspects of alternatives methods validation, how to perform classical validation, its pitfalls, and strategies to overcome them.

Evidence-based toxicology requires some knowledge of bioinformatics. The first lesson in the module teaches you some biostatistical tools you can apply when analyzing predectivity, specificity, and sensitivity of a method. You will also learn how to identify biases in a study with the help of bioinformatics. Evidence-based principles can be applied to every question you might have, even to which pizza to order tonight. You will learn the difference between eminence-based vs. evidence-based approaches. You will learn what is driving the lack of reproducibility and how evidence-based approaches should help to overcome the reproducibility crisis in science, which is explained with examples of experimental design, wrong models, poor quality of the cell cultures, etc.

The final week of the course is devoted to completing the Systematic Review Assignment. You will use SysRev to review at least 20 abstracts, apply inclusion and exclusion criteria, render decisions, and resolve conflicts with other reviewers.