RACH-mix

New tools for risk assessment of chemical mixtures

The primary aim with RACH-Mix is to develop and demonstrate new strategies for risk assessment of mixtures of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that complement traditional single compound and additivity methods. The project focuses on mixture effects on children’s metabolism and growth, an adverse outcome of high public health concern. The project will build on the results from a previous project, where we have developed a whole mixture approach, which transforms single chemical regulatory guidelines approaches to a similar strategy for mixtures. In RACH-Mix we will further develop this approach by comparing the whole mixture strategy to single chemical and cumulative approaches based on experimental data produced in the EpiTox lab.

We use human mesenchymal stem cells and zebrafish embryos as model systems, as they fulfill the needs of today’s chemical testing for medium - to high throughput screening and are in line with the 3R principle of animal welfare (Replace, Reduce, and Refine animal testing). In these models, we will compare epigenetic signatures of mixture exposure with exposure to single chemicals and link those signatures to phenotypic outcomes. The metrics obtained with data from these more sensitive models will then be compared to the ones based on mouse data obtained in EDC-MixRisk.

This project will, on one hand, provide experimental results for developing risk assessment methodology and, on the other hand, contribute to developing more sensitive endpoints for chemical (mixture) testing.

Project funding: Formas project grant

Responsible researchers: MSc. Polina Lizunkova, Dr. Elin Engdahl

Main collaborators: Assoc. Prof. Joachim Sturve, University of Gothenburg; Prof. Carl-Gustaf Bornehag, Karlstad University