The present invention is related to a method for determining the sensitizing potential of a chemical (test) compound, comprising the steps of: (a) Providing a suitable cell culture of a specific cell type and providing a test sample and a control sample thereof, said test sample and said control sample being identical, (b) Exposing said test sample to a chemical compound in a solvent and exposing said control sample to said solvent for a predetermined period of time, (c) Determining for the test sample and the control sample gene expressions xi for a subset of i=1 to n genes selected from the group of genes corresponding to SEQ ID NOs 1 to 153, (d) For this subset of n genes looking up in a database the gene expressions xi for a set of control and test samples, the test samples being exposed for said predetermined period of time to a set of chemical sensitizing model compounds comprising both sensitizers and non-sensitizers, (e) Using the gene expressions of the said test sample and the said control sample of step (c) as input to a statistical classification model that is based on said database and that is trained and optimized to classify chemical compounds as either sensitizers or non-sensitizers using gene expressions xi for said subset of n genes, and (f) Predicting through said model whether the chemical compound tested belongs to the class of sensitizers or to the class of non-sensitizers.