Analysis and comparison of information and data recorded in carcinogenicity and genotoxicity databases.

The Interlab Project is a university-industry joint project recently funded by the Italian government as part of the improvement of the Italian research infrastructure; among its short-term goals are the implementation of data banks of biomedical interest and the spread of informatic tools for biomedical research. Results of both long-term assays of carcinogenicity in rodents and short-term in vitro and in vivo tests of genotoxicity are relevant for a wide body of users, ranging from carcinogenesis research laboratories to industries and governmental agencies. To evaluate the most appropriate ways of spreading information on these experiments, a detailed analysis on information recorded in available databases has been carried out. Furthermore, the contents of the most known databases have been compared, with respect to a specific compound, to evaluate both the overall reliability of these systems, compared to longer and more complex assessments carried out manually starting from bibliographic searches, and the level of concordance among them.