A year ago and hundreds of pages earlier, Jim and I have embraced a journey with fellow toxicologists to navigate the treacherous road through safety assessment to destination “successful drugs.” This book is the result – a roadmap – of this effort. Our traveling companion co-authors share their experiences and provide plenty of good advice, but this safety travel guide also raises important questions about the present status regarding the safety assessment of future medicines: It is a bumpy road.

We asked our colleagues to focus on integrated safety assessment models within their expert area of preclinical toxicology with an open eye on advances predicted by novel scientific discoveries and innovative experimental design. The content of this book reveals the richness of the landscape of preclinical safety, which is increasingly enhanced by ideas and methodologies offered by genomics, metabolomics, and proteomics. We are confident that readers using this book will find their topic of interest in preclinical toxicology and will be provided with an updated account of the field. All or most chapters combine theoretical and technological information and give guidance on data interpretation. We realize that today everyone is swamped with information, which does not always generate knowledge. Ever more pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and academic institutions realize that the use of smart information technology and in silico tools is necessary to correlate and interpret data.