Industrialization has massively increased the introduction of chemicals into the environment. However, the physiological effects of the chemicals are insufficiently known, because animal studies are costly and ethically troubled. Regulators hope to adopt to high-throughput human cell-based assays instead, but these are often not capable of predicting all biologically relevant adverse effects. This project addresses the challenges related to chemical toxicity assessment by developing new, microchip-based assays to replace animal studies. The microchip assays will integrate a critical step, namely production of biological metabolites that is lacking from the current assays, with the cell-based toxicity assessment. They also allow identification of the toxic metabolites by mass spectrometry and predicting the distribution of chemicals in the body. Thus, the microchip assays are expected to give a comprehensive view of the chemicals' effects in human, without need for animal studies.

2017

2022