Evaluation of health risks of mixtures of substances

BfR contributes to improved evaluation in EuroMix project

21-Aug-2019 - Germany

The EuroMix project (European Test and Risk Assessment Strategies for Mixtures) has been successfully completed after four years with the participation of the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR). In the EU-funded research project, 26 European institutions jointly developed a strategy with which the health risk of mixtures of substances in food can be better investigated and evaluated. "We ingest many different substances with food at the same time. In order to assess health risks, possible combination effects must be better considered in future," says BfR President Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel. "The EuroMix project has succeeded in designing a new testing strategy for the evaluation of mixtures of substances. It also has the potential to reduce the number of animal experiments."

The BfR participated in the research project as the institution commissioned in Germany with the assessment of health risks of substances with two departments with the following background: Food can contain potentially harmful substances, such as pesticide residues or naturally occurring substances. So far, however, it has been difficult to assess the health risk of mixtures of substances because toxicological data are usually only collected for individual substances. They are often missing for mixtures. The EuroMix project was intended to establish a scientific foundation with which the toxicity of mixtures of substances could be better determined experimentally in the future.

New test methods and a harmonised risk assessment at European and international level should improve risk assessment in the future. In the project, the BfR took over the analysis of the current legal basis for the risk assessment of mixtures of substances and their methods. Deficits were identified and recommendations for a new audit strategy to be developed were developed on this basis. In addition, four workshops were organised where international scientists discussed how a harmonised approach can also be implemented outside Europe. Within the framework of EuroMix, a WHO expert group also met in April 2019 and published a first approach for the risk assessment of substance combinations.

The EuroMix project was also intended to reduce the number of animal experiments in the risk assessment of mixtures of substances. The BfR therefore investigated how alternative methods, for example computer-aided tests or in vitro methods, could be used to reduce animal experiments in the field of testing mixtures of substances. For example, the scientists investigated combination effects of different substances in liver cells in order to be able to predict combination effects with the help of in vitro tests that build on each other. However, in order to completely replace animal experiments in the risk assessment of mixtures of substances, further research is needed, according to the results.

In the EuroMix project, which was funded by the EU research and innovation programme "Horizon 2020" with 8 million euros, 26 institutions cooperated. The Dutch Institute for Public Health and Environmental Protection (RIVM) was responsible for coordination. The results are published on the project website www.euromixproject.eu . Talks are currently taking place for possible follow-up projects of EuroMix.

Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.

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