Patrick Mcmullen Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

Chicago, Il, Us

Chicago, Il, Us

Durham, North Carolina, Us

ScitoVation is a global leader in the implementation of cell-based and computational approaches for assessing chemical safety and efficacy challenges. As the Director of Computational Toxicology, I work with a diverse group of scientists to develop solutions based on cutting-edge bioinformatics and pharmacokinetics technologies. I collaborate with industry, government, and academic stakeholders to develop and use these emerging tools for more effective chemical safety decision making.

Durham, North Carolina, Us

Research Triangle Park, Durham, Nc, Us

The Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics uses modeling and high-content data to deepen our understanding of how chemicals interact with biological systems. The Center will combine expertise and tools from different disciplines to develop innovative strategies for using large-scale data (from toxicogenomics, high-throughput screens, and other sources) to solve problems related to chemical and drug safety. The goal of this work is to replace conventional in-life animal testing with a chemical safety assessment paradigm that focuses on informative cell-based assays and predictive computational models.

Research Triangle Park, Durham, Nc, Us

A major aspect of the Hamner’s mission is to develop in vitro and computational models that can reduce our dependence on animal systems for toxicity testing. I approach this challenge by leveraging a dense assembly of high-throughput biological data to build mechanistic descriptions of biological pathways. Understanding the structure and dynamics of toxicity pathways—systems that respond to intrinsic and extrinsic chemical and stress perturbations—will help establish what types and degrees of chemical exposures impact human health.Together with my experimental collaborators, I am mapping the mechanisms that translate a cellular input into a specific response. Most toxicity pathways share a common core architecture. A nuclear receptor or other transcription factor is activated by a relevant stressor and institutes a transcriptional change by directly binding to the promoters of target genes. While this textbook description may constitute a first-order approximation, we are discovering auxiliary mechanisms that modulate how a cell senses and responds to perturbations. I hypothesize that the extent of activation of these parallel responses is a major determinant of the toxicity of a compound. We are working with compounds such as peroxisome proliferators, endocrine disruptors, and DNA damaging agents to test this and other questions that require a firm understanding of the structure and dynamics of toxicity pathways.

Research Triangle Park, Durham, Nc, Us

Chicago, Il, Us

Evanston, Il, Us

Doctor Of Philosophy (Phd), Chemical And Biological Engineering

Bachelor Of Science (Bs), Chemical Engineering And Biology