Recently the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) sponsored a comparative exercise in which different prediction approaches (both biologically and chemically based) were challenged for their predictive abilities of rodent carcinogenicity of a common set of chemicals. The exercise enjoyed remarkable scientific success and stimulated NTP to sponsor a second challenging round of tests, inviting participants to present predictions relative to the rodent carcinogenicity of a further 30 chemicals; these are currently being tested. In this article, we present our predictions based on structure-activity relationship considerations. In our procedure, first each chemical was assigned to an activity mechanism class and then, with semiquantitative considerations, was assigned a probability carcinogenicity score, taking into account simultaneously the hypothesized action mechanism and physical chemical parameters.
