ERA|ARE

A new ERA for Environmental Risk Assessment:

Chirality as a tool towards environmentally safe pharmaceuticals

Project description

The detrimental effects on ecosystems and human health caused by the emerging contamination of aquatic environment by pharmaceuticals, their metabolites and transformation products (TPs) urge a disruptive prevention strategy. ERA|ARE aspires to build a strong ground for the realization of an internationally leading research group dedicated to promoting environmental safety. ERA|ARE approach is based on fundamental understanding of enantioselectivity of environmental processes that can impact the fate/behaviour of chiral fluorinated antibiotics/anti-cancer agents as a proof of concept, since most small molecules approved in the last years are either fluorinated and/or chiral, presenting a stable C-F bond and a potentially enantioselective bioactivity.

The project is led by the R&D unit Laboratory of Separation and Reaction Engineering-Laboratory of Catalysis and Materials (LSRE-LCM), Associate Laboratory in Chemical Engineering (ALiCE), Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP),
in partnership with the Bundesanstalt für Gewässerkunde (BfG), Koblenz, Germany.

Activities

To attain its goals, ERA|ARE will exploit the chirality of selected antibiotics to:

1) realize the impact of stereochemistry on antimicrobial resistance by testing the hypothesis that antibiotic resistance may be acquired in wastewater treatment plants;

2) reveal how to better select drug candidates by biodegradability;

3) pave the way for future directions of Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA); and

4) avoid ecotoxicological effects and bioaccumulation.

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