Endocrine Disruptors Chemicals (EDCs): improving the current health risk assessment procedure through theoretical and experimental approaches

This project aims at improving the risk assessment procedure currently adopted for the endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), focusing in particular on those contained in food contact materials and articles and affecting thyroid homeostasis and Male/Female Human Reproductive System. EDCs generally display a complex toxicity profile, thus making toxicological evaluation and health risk assessment difficult to achieve. The current standardized methods are rather insufficient to identify and test their complex toxicity, and the application of traditional risk assessment principles may be problematic for this kind of substances. This issue is even more crucial when ECDs are part of food contact materials and articles, which are commonly used by the whole population. The increasingly wider distribution of these products on the global market raised the exposure of consumers to chemical agents on constant and cumulative basis, even for persistent compounds, highlighting the urgency of governing the matter. A number of lists including chemicals exploited for the manufacture of food contact materials and articles have been drawn up by international regulators and public and private bodies. However, besides far from being harmonized, they do not provide systematic information regarding thyroid disrupting properties. Actually, the awareness of science on the thyroid and Male/Female Human Reproductive System safety profile of compounds intentionally used in the food planet is still limited and fragmented, thus requiring an intensive research activity to fill the existing knowledge gap. We carried out a thoroughly survey of the available databases of chemicals for food contact materials and articles, selecting sixteen EDCs characterized by a high level of uncertainty concerning the toxicological profile and/or dearth of information on human exposure data. The selected compounds have been investigated by making use of an experimental mapping procedure. The outcome of the experimental mapping procedure on the compounds selected allowed us to move forward to perform new experiment by computational tools and in vitro and in vivo studies, to ascertain their adverse thyroid and Male/Female Human Reproductive System effects. The resulting outcomes will allow to achieve a reliable risk assessment for the benefit of entire population.