Toxicology Editing and Proofreading Services

The compound caused liver tumours in rats. It also caused them at a dose seven hundred times human exposure, by a mechanism that depends on a receptor rats have and people do not, in a strain with a high background rate of exactly that tumour. Every word of the finding is true and the headline written from it is not.

We edit what toxicologists write — study reports and their interpretation, dose–response analyses, mechanistic and mode of action work, risk assessments and hazard characterisations, regulatory submissions and dossiers, epidemiological and occupational studies, systematic reviews for hazard identification, and theses, articles and technical reports. Our editors work on dose–response and relevance.

Toxicology is the discipline of dose and relevance, and the failure is a hazard reported without the exposure at which it occurs or the mechanism that determines whether it applies to people. A finding of harm at any dose in any species is not yet a statement about risk. We work through these so the dose–response relationship is characterised across the range tested with the shape described, since a threshold response and a linear one imply completely different conclusions at low exposure; so the doses are expressed in terms comparable to human exposure — as a margin, as a body weight adjusted equivalent, or better as internal exposure — because milligrams per kilogram in a rodent is not a human dose; so the mode of action is described where it bears on relevance, given that a mechanism absent in humans changes the interpretation entirely and a mechanism shared strengthens it; so the background incidence in the strain used is reported alongside the treated incidence; so the highest dose is described in relation to toxicity generally, as effects at a dose that overwhelms normal handling may say nothing about lower exposures; so uncertainty and the factors applied to it are stated as choices with their basis; and so the difference between hazard and risk is maintained throughout the text. Reports written this way are used correctly by the people who make decisions from them.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished studies, compound data and regulatory material. We are editors rather than toxicologists or regulatory scientists, and we offer no view on hazard, risk or safety. What we can do is keep dose and relevance attached to the finding.