How to deal with risk assessment of real-life mixtures? - the PANORAMIX project's framework

Maria João Valente, National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

Host: Alice Santos Silva, UCIBIO, FFUP

ZOOM link: https://ucibio.pt/l/GuestSeminars

Abstract:

Humans are continuously exposed to hundreds of potentially hazardous chemicals that either contaminate our environment and food or are added to our daily consumer products. One of the goals of the EU’s Green Deal and zero-pollution ambition for a toxic-free environment is to tackle the existent gaps in chemical mixture risk assessment by providing scientific grounds that support the implementation of adequate regulatory measures within the EU. Under the framework of the EU’s Green Deal project PANORAMIX, we proposed to deal with this challenge by: characterising ‘real-life’ chemical mixtures and how they are transferred from the environment to humans, and from mother to child; establishing a high-throughput animal-free strategy for screening of whole-mixtures using integrated chemical profiling together with effect-directed analysis; evaluating at which level chemical mixtures might be of concern for children’s development; and developing a web-based, ready-to-use chemical mixture calculator.
 

Short CV:

Maria João Valente is a Postdoc Researcher at the National Food Institute, at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). She is a part of the Cell Toxicology Team, where she has been developing research focused on Mixture Toxicology, contributing for different national and European projects. Together with her team, Maria João is working on the assessment of reproductive and developmental toxicity of complex chemical mixtures as presented in real-life scenarios, resorting to animal-free strategies.
Before moving to Denmark, Maria João has developed work in different fields of research, with a main focus on Mechanistic Toxicology and Biochemistry, within the Toxicology (PhD) and later the Drugs, Targets and Biomarkers Research Labs (Postdoc) at UCIBIO, FFUP.
Between current work at DTU with several international partners, and the close collaborations kept from previous works, Maria João displays a multidisciplinary background with around 40 publications within a wide range of research areas.