Inside Discover Toxicology, the Open Access Journal Betting Big on the Future of Poison Science

Toxicology has never been a more urgent science. More than 350,000 chemical substances are currently in commercial use worldwide, and organisms from plankton to people are exposed not to single compounds but to shifting, lifelong cocktails of pollutants, drugs, nanomaterials, and food contaminants. Against that backdrop, Springer Nature’s fully open access journal Discover Toxicology has published a wide-ranging editorial in which the members of its academic leadership lay out the subfields they steward and the research frontiers they most want to see submitted. The piece, written by Adekunle A. Bakare, Ajay Vikram Singh, Edmond Sanganyado, João Paulo Capela, Maranda Esterhuizen, Yu-Syuan Luo, and Yao Guo, functions simultaneously as a mission statement and a technical roadmap for where the discipline is heading.

Discover Toxicology was inaugurated in May 2024 as a peer-reviewed, open access platform intended to publish research across all aspects of toxicology and its applications in research, development, and society. Its founding premise, the editors explain, is to give researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and stakeholders a venue to exchange knowledge, share best practices, and collaborate on solutions to pressing toxicological challenges. Like other journals in the Discover series, it welcomes all valid research, including null results, regardless of perceived impact, provided the work meets the standards of rigor and quality associated with Springer Nature. That policy is a deliberate counterweight to publication cultures that reward only headline-grabbing findings, a bias the editors argue has left critical dynamics of toxicological mechanisms in low-resourced countries understudied.

The breadth of the journal’s ambition is reflected in its Editorial Board, whose listed expertise spans toxins and venoms, clinical and preclinical pharmacology and toxicology, bioinformatics and cheminformatics, computational chemistry, ecotoxicity, regulatory toxicology, emerging contaminants, food safety, genetic toxicology, analytical chemistry, risk assessment, mechanisms of toxicity, omics, immunotoxicology, forensic pathology, and occupational exposure assessment. In the editorial, each Section Editor introduces the domain he or she represents, offering an unusually candid view of the technical questions the journal considers most pressing.

Professor Adekunle A. Bakare of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, anchors the genotoxicology section. His laboratory studies the genotoxicity and mutagenicity of xenobiotics, the foreign chemicals that urbanization and industrialization have made almost impossible to avoid. Using in vitro and in vivo bioassays, his group examines the cytotoxic, genotoxic, and mutagenic effects of municipal solid waste leachates, industrial effluents, pesticides, analgesics, medicinal plant extracts, antiretroviral and antituberculosis drugs, metal and metal oxide nanoparticles, and electronic waste elutriates. The stakes, he argues, are generational: DNA damage from environmental xenobiotics is implicated not only in cancer and birth defects but also in heart disease, cellular aging, immune dysfunction, altered metabolism, neurodegenerative disease, and cataracts, and germline damage may affect future as well as current generations. He invites submissions on genotoxicity testing approaches, predictive toxicology, toxicogenomics, reproductive toxicology, epigenetics, gene expression analysis of DNA toxicity, artificial intelligence applied to DNA damage, and the links between genotoxicity and carcinogenesis.

Ajay Vikram Singh, a senior scientist at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) in Berlin, represents the computational and nanotoxicology frontier. Working within an institute of more than 750 scientists that advises the German government on food and product safety, chemical risks, contaminants, animal protection, and consumer health, Singh combines advanced computational models, artificial intelligence, and nanoscale characterization to decipher how chemicals, nanomaterials, and biological systems interact. The goal is proactive safety assessment: predicting toxicity before products reach the market and enabling the design of inherently safer, so-called safer-by-design materials. He highlights the integration of multi-omics data with computational approaches, the nanobiophysics of mechanistic toxicology, and the regulatory challenges posed by complex novel materials, and he welcomes manuscripts using in silico methods, AI and machine learning-driven predictive toxicology, high-throughput screening data analysis, and mechanistic studies of engineered nanomaterials.

Edmond Sanganyado, associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan, works at the intersection of analytical chemistry and systems biology, developing tools that link exposure to toxicological effect through advanced omics technologies. He frames three questions that he believes will define the field: how to detect and quantify known and unknown toxicants and their metabolites quickly, cheaply, and reliably in real samples; how complex mixtures of pollutants affect organisms, ecosystems, and humans over a lifetime; and how to identify toxic substances in ways that stand up in court, keep pace with drug trends, and support public health. Big data, artificial intelligence, high-resolution mass spectrometry, and new approach methodologies, or NAMs, are driving all three disciplines, analytical, environmental, and forensic toxicology, toward mixture-based paradigms and toward reducing and replacing animal testing. But he cautions that publication norms emphasizing narrow novelty risk leaving the toxicology of low-resourced countries chronically understudied.

Neuropharmacologist João Paulo Capela of Portugal’s Fernando Pessoa University and the University of Porto brings the journal’s coverage to drugs of abuse and clinical toxicology. His research probes the brain actions of amphetamine-type stimulants and methylphenidate, both as illicit substances and as prescribed treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other brain disorders. His central concern is translation: whether work is done in vitro or in animals, the purpose of mechanistic toxicology is to transfer findings to the human situation in order to prevent, mitigate, or treat adverse drug effects. He sees artificial intelligence-based tools as a promising means of elevating that mechanistic understanding, and he argues that new methodologies and models are essential for surveying how drugs and toxicants inflict damage at the cellular and molecular level.

Ecotoxicologist Maranda Esterhuizen, affiliated with the University of Helsinki and Häme University of Applied Sciences in Finland, specializes in pollution impact assessment and ecological restoration through nature-based solutions, with a deliberately transdisciplinary approach bridging environmental science and policy. She describes environmental toxicology as standing at a critical juncture, confronting complex chemical mixtures and climate-induced shifts in pollutant behavior, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions. Her section invites research using adverse outcome pathways, omics technologies, and predictive modeling to understand toxicity across biological scales, and she singles out studies integrating climate change dynamics, urbanization, and chemical mixture interactions as especially welcome, because they mirror the compounded pressures ecosystems actually face.

Food and computational toxicologist Yu-Syuan Luo of National Taiwan University completes the editorial leadership roster. His focus is on human-relevant, mechanism-informed chemical safety evaluation at a time when data gaps for emerging contaminants, low-dose exposures, and complex mixtures impede timely regulatory decisions. Food toxicology, he notes, is pivotal for assessing ingredients, contaminants, and food-contact materials, especially for endpoints such as endocrine disruption and mixture toxicity. Computational toxicology complements it with scalable predictive tools, including in silico modeling, omics-based profiling, and data-driven hazard identification and prioritization, supporting the global shift away from traditional animal testing and toward more efficient, transparent, forward-looking risk assessment.

Taken together, the editorial sketches a discipline in methodological upheaval: from single-compound testing toward mixtures, from animal models toward new approach methodologies, from reactive hazard characterization toward AI-assisted prediction and safer-by-design chemistry. By welcoming null results and prioritizing rigor over novelty, Discover Toxicology is positioning itself as a home for precisely the unglamorous, reproducible, and globally inclusive work that this transition requires, and the editors close with an open invitation to researchers worldwide to submit work spanning fundamental questions and real-world applications alike.

Subject of Research: An editorial by the section editors of the open access journal Discover Toxicology outlining research priorities across genotoxicology, computational and nanotoxicology, ecotoxicology, neurotoxicology, and food toxicology.

Article Title: Discover Toxicology, the future journal for your toxicology research

Article References: Bakare, A. A., Singh, A. V., Sanganyado, E., Capela, J. P., Esterhuizen, M., Luo, Y.-S., & Guo, Y. (2026). Discover Toxicology, the future journal for your toxicology research. Discover Toxicology, 3(1), Article 12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44339-026-00053-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44339-026-00053-1

Keywords: Discover Toxicology, toxicology, open access publishing, genotoxicity, xenobiotics, computational toxicology, nanotoxicology, ecotoxicology, new approach methodologies, food toxicology, chemical mixtures, risk assessment