4 research outputs found
Receptor-based in vitro activities to assess human exposure to chemical mixtures and related health impacts
Humans are exposed to a large number of chemicals from sources such as the environment, food, and consumer
products. There is growing concern that human exposure to chemical mixtures, especially during critical periods
of development, increases the risk of adverse health effects in newborns or later in life. Historically, the onechemical-at-a-time approach has been applied both for exposure assessment and hazard characterisation, leading to insufficient knowledge about human health effects caused by exposure to mixtures of chemicals that have
the same target. To circumvent this challenge researchers can apply in vitro assays to analyse both exposure to
and human health effects of chemical mixtures in biological samples. The advantages of using in vitro assays are:
(i) that an integrated effect is measured, taking combined mixture effects into account and (ii) that in vitro assays
can reduce complexity in identification of Chemicals of Emerging Concern (CECs) in human tissues.
We have reviewed the state-of-the-art on the use of receptor-based in vitro assays to assess human exposure to
chemical mixtures and related health impacts. A total of 43 studies were identified, in which endpoints for the
arylhydrocarbon receptor (AhR), the estrogen receptor (ER), and the androgen receptor (AR) were used. The
majority of studies reported biological activities that could be associated with breast cancer incidence, male
reproductive health effects, developmental toxicities, human demographic characteristics or lifestyle factors such
as dietary patterns. A few studies used the bioactivities to check the coverage of the chemical analyses of the
human samples, whereas in vitro assays have so far not regularly been used for identifying CECs in human
samples, but rather in environmental matrices or food packaging materials.
A huge field of novel applications using receptor-based in vitro assays for mixture toxicity assessment on
human samples and effect-directed analysis (EDA) using high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) for identification of toxic compounds waits for exploration. In the future this could lead to a paradigm shift in the way we
unravel adverse human health effects caused by chemical mixtures.European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme HBM4EU
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