Photo: G. Narahari Sastry, Indira Ghosh, Barry Hardy, and Alok Dhowan in 2019 at the OpenTox Community Development and Launch in India.

Edelweiss Connect initiated OpenTox as a collaborative project to develop a framework for unified access to toxicity data, (Q)SAR models, procedures supporting validation and additional information that aids in the interpretation of (Q)SAR predictions. By bringing together enterprise, university and government research groups within one project, Edelweiss Connect saw OpenToxas a way to make a global impact on toxicology beneficial to all. The project’s success led to the global OpenTox community and such important follow-up research projects as ToxBank, eNanoMapper and OpenRiskNet.

Edelweiss Connect remains active in the OpenTox community, helping to organise its conferences in Europe, USA and India and establish local chapters (now in the US, Switzerland, Korea and India).

“OpenTox has been really effective at bringing people together of diverse backgrounds and opened a common dialogue among the participants,” says Steve Edwards, Bioinformatics Senior Scientist, RTI International.

“What makes the OpenTox community so interesting is that scientists from different disciplines are all talking to each other, exchanging and harmonizing data,” says Clemens Wittwehr of the EU’s Joint Research Centre.