Seeking emerging substances: hope or hype? – 28 April – 9:30 am CEST

A global framework for seeking emerging chemicals as a support to human biomonitoring was developed within HBM4EU WP16. This framework is including (1) the development of an extended database and related mass spectrometric reference library of known emerging chemicals, (2) the generation of non-targeted high-resolution mass spectrometry profiles from human samples, and (3) linking of exposure and hazard data through effect-directed-analysis. From the initial state-of-the-art, the work achieved permitted to build the basis of an EU network with harmonised competences in the field of suspect and non-targeted screening applied to human matrices, and to develop and conduct several proof-of-concept studies illustrating the usefulness of these approaches. This resulted in more than 3000 analysed samples and several hundreds of detected exposure markers. This work also permitted to identify a number of limitations associated to these approaches, in particular the bottleneck associated to the identification of the exposure markers detected by these large-scale approaches. A number of conclusions and recommendations were elaborated as sustainable perspectives of this work, in particular with regard to the next PARC initiative.

JP Antignac is scientist belonging to the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE). Head deputy of the LABERCA research Unit (Oniris, INRAE, Nantes, France), he is also contributing to public expertise working groups for INSERM and the French Food Safety Agency (ANSES). His competence areas are the analysis of organic chemical residues and contaminants in biological matrices for risk assessment and environmental health purposes. His specific research field is the study of endocrine disrupting chemicals from a human exposure assessment point of view. He is involved in several projects studying the relation between this chemical exposome and human health, and leads the HBM4EU WP16 on emerging chemicals. His is author or co-author of more than 170 publications and his current h-index is 44.