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Evidence-based Toxicology

Johns Hopkins University

About this Course

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Welcome to the Evidence-based Toxicology (EBT) course. In medicine and healthcare, evidence-based medicine has revolutionized the way that information is evaluated transparently and objectively. Over the past ten years, a movement in North America and Europe has attempted to translate this revolution to the field of toxicology.
The Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) within the department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hosts the first chair for EBT and the secretariat for the EBT Collaboration on both sides of the Atlantic. Based on the Cochrane Collaboration in Evidence-based Medicine, the EBT Collaboration was established at the CAAT to foster the development of a process for quality assurance of new toxicity tests for the assessment of safety in humans and the environment.
Regulatory safety sciences have undergone remarkably little change in the past fifty years. At the same time, our knowledge in the life sciences is doubling about every seven years. Systematic review and related evidence-based approaches are beginning to be adapted by regulatory agencies like the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), and the US National Toxicology Program. They provide transparent, objective, and consistent tools to identify, select, appraise, and extract evidence across studies. 
This course will showcase these emerging efforts and address opportunities and challenges to the expanded use of these tools within toxicology.

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Shareable Certificate

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Beginner Level

Approx. 20 hours to complete

English

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Flexible deadlines

Reset deadlines in accordance to your schedule.

Shareable Certificate

Earn a Certificate upon completion

100% online

Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.

Beginner Level

Approx. 20 hours to complete

English

Could your company benefit from training employees on in-demand skills?

Try Coursera for Business

Instructors

Instructor rating

4.68/5 (29 Ratings)

Thomas Hartung

Professor

Environmental Health and Engineering

14,404 Learners

2 Courses

Lena Smirnova

Research Associate

Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing

14,404 Learners

2 Courses

Offered by

Johns Hopkins University

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Syllabus - What you will learn from this course

Week

Week 1

2 hours to complete

Introduction & Shortcomings of Current Approaches

2 hours to complete

9 videos (Total 66 min), 3 readings, 1 quiz

9 videos

Welcome3m

Introduction to the Course14m

Introduction5m

Shortcoming No. 1: Narrative Reviews7m

Shortcoming No. 2: Bias in Reviews7m

Shortcoming No. 3: Evidence Writing4m

Shortcoming No. 4: External Validity10m

Shortcoming No. 5: Assessing New Methods5m

Shortcoming No. 6: Inadequate Reporting7m

3 readings

Letter to Learners10m

Course Learning Objectives10m

Supporting reading10m

1 practice exercise

Practice Quiz 130m

Week

Week 2

3 hours to complete

History and Causation

This module explains how evidence-based toxicology originated and describes the driving forces for the initiative. In the second lesson, you will learn how to distinguish between correlation and causation as well as the main problems with drawing conclusions on the basis of correlations. The Bradford Hill criteria are introduced, along with examples for each criterion. You will also learn about mechanistic toxicology and mechanistic validation.

3 hours to complete

11 videos (Total 138 min), 2 readings, 1 quiz

11 videos

Welcome to Module 21m

Personal First Exposures to Evidence-Based Medicine21m

The Start of EBT16m

The First Conference 2007 to the Start of the EBT Collaboration 201114m

The Evidence-Based Toxicology Collaboration (EBTC)13m

Introduction Causation vs. Correlation18m

The Hill Principles of Epidemiology and their Relation to Toxicology16m

The Problem of Causation in Toxicology16m

Biomarker Concept in Mechanistic Toxicology4m

Mechanistic Validation4m

The Future of Causation in Complex Systems9m

2 readings

Supporting reading10m

1 practice exercise

Practice Quiz 230m

Week

Week 3

3 hours to complete

Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

3 hours to complete

8 videos (Total 101 min), 2 readings, 2 quizzes

Week

Week 4

2 hours to complete

Risk of Bias & Application to Test Methods Comparison

This module teaches you about possible biases that can be introduced at different stages of research. Each bias is explained with examples, including solutions for overcoming those biases. The second lesson covers systematic review of the zebrafish embryotoxicity test as a case study conducted by the Evidence-based Toxicology Collaboration (EBTC). You will go through all of the steps of the systematic review again to imprint the knowledge from module 3, but this systematic review will be related to a toxicological method.

2 hours to complete

8 videos (Total 94 min), 2 readings, 1 quiz

8 videos

Welcome to Module 43m

Introduction to Risk of Bias Concept in Critical Appraisal of Studies26m

Examples for Risk of Bias Tools 1: Cochrane Collboration4m

Examples for Risk of Bias Tools 2: SYRCLE's RoB Tool5m

Examples of Risk of Bias Tools 3: National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) - OHAT12m

Quality Assessment in Evidence-Based Toxicology7m

Evidence-Based Toxicology (EBT) and Evidence-Based Toxicology Collaboration (EBTC)11m

Zebrafish Systematic Review22m

2 readings

Supporting reading10m

1 practice exercise

Practice Quiz 410m

Week

Week 5

3 hours to complete

Quality Assurance, Good Practices, and Validation

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.

3 hours to complete

10 videos (Total 140 min), 2 readings, 1 quiz

10 videos

Welcome to Module 52m

The Concepts of Quality Assurance (QA) and Good Practice (GP)14m

Good Practice22m

Quality Assurance12m

Importance of GP and QA in EBT5m

The Evolution of Validation of Alternative Methods29m

The Traditional Validation Process26m

Example of a Validation Study: Skin Irritation9m

Developments in the Validation Area6m

Validation and Tox-21c/EBT11m

2 readings

Supporting reading10m

1 practice exercise

Practice Quiz 530m

Week

Week 6

3 hours to complete

Biometrical Tools & Future Perspectives

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.

3 hours to complete

8 videos (Total 98 min), 1 reading, 2 quizzes

8 videos

Welcome to Module 64m

Why We Need Biometry/Statistics in Evidence-Based Toxicology9m

Statistics and Bioinformatics Applied in Evidence-Based Approaches I11m

Statistics and Bioinformatics Applied in Evidence-Based Approaches II18m

Risk and Bias and Its Impact on Evidence-Based Approaches12m

Evidence-Based Is a More Rigorous Scientific Approach to Anything4m

The Reproducibility Crisis in Science25m

Where Is Evidence-Based Toxicology (EBT) and What Are The Next Steps?11m

1 reading

Supporting reading10m

2 practice exercises

Practice quiz 630m

Final exam30m

Week

Week 7

2 hours to complete

Summative Assessment - Systematic Review Assignment

2 hours to complete

1 reading

Reviews

4.7

22 reviews

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TOP REVIEWS FROM EVIDENCE-BASED TOXICOLOGY

by EEApr 5, 2019

Surprisingly very informative and detailed Course. Thanks for the load of information given.

by MMJun 11, 2020

The course was very well thought out and very informative

by NFJul 31, 2021

Excellent, it has given me a very clear and complete vision.gave me a very clear and complete picture.

by HHJul 4, 2020

Quite informative and exposed me to a whole new horizon in the ever blooming world of toxicology. I would like to thank Dr. Thomas Hartung and his team at John Hopkins for making this possible!

View all reviews

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Is financial aid available?
Yes. In select learning programs, you can apply for financial aid or a scholarship if you can’t afford the enrollment fee. If fin aid or scholarship is available for your learning program selection, you’ll find a link to apply on the description page.

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Evidence-based Toxicology

Evidence-based Toxicology

About this Course