Descrizione del progetto
L’esposizione chimica ambientale grava pesantemente sul cuore
Le sostanze chimiche tossiche sono presenti ovunque nell’ambiente. Dai residui di pesticidi alle tracce di farmaci che si trovano nell’acqua, nel suolo, nell’aria e negli organismi viventi, le persone sono continuamente esposte a ingenti quantità e varietà di potenziali sostanze tossiche. Al tempo stesso, è stata osservata una crescente frequenza di malattie cardiovascolari, il che suggerisce l’ipotesi che i due fenomeni siano correlati. Per affrontare questo problema, il progetto ALTERNATIVE, finanziato dall’UE, svilupperà una piattaforma che consente di individuare, quantificare e prevenire la co-esposizione cardiotossica a sostanze chimiche industriali e farmaci. La piattaforma si articolerà in un modello tridimensionale in vitro che replica il tessuto cardiaco umano, combinato con un sistema di monitoraggio affidabile ad alte prestazioni basato su analisi multiomiche e integrato in uno strumento per la valutazione dei rischi basato sull’apprendimento automatico.
Obiettivo
ALTERNATIVE will develop an innovative platform able to detect the cardiotoxicity of chemicals and their bio-transformation products. The novel platform will enable regulators and industry to identify, quantify and prevent cardiotoxic co-exposures to industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals in a cost-effective way. ALTERNATIVE will particularly focus on cardiotoxic effects on older people, which is of high relevance in view of the ageing EU population and the high spread of cardiovascular diseases.
The platform will consist of a three-dimensional tissue engineering in-vitro model mimicking the human cardiac tissue, coupled with a reliable, high-throughput monitoring system based on multi-omics analyses, and integrated into a Machine Learning (ML) risk assessment tool. In addition, ALTERNATIVE will modify the tissue model to reproduce the aged myocardial tissue and elucidate the adverse effects of chemicals on older people. ALTERNATIVE?s proof-of-concept validation will be performed on well-known mixtures of pollutants, affecting different environmental compartments, and selected via epidemiological, toxicological and modelling expertise.
ALTERNATIVE will also provide systematic reviews of high-quality epidemiological studies to support integrated in vitro and in silico data, giving a more robust basis for regulatory decisions.
The ALTERNATIVE platform will be an innovative tool for complying with the current regulation associated with the assessment of chemical compounds. It will be a new instrument to evaluate unpredictable toxicity due to synergistic effects of different chemicals, additionally worsened by the human ageing process.
By introducing an in vitro cardiac system and ML models, ALTERNATIVE will provide a platform able to refine, reduce and replace the need for animal testing, providing close-to-real scenario information on toxicity and achieving a significant reduction of the associated direct and indirect costs.
Campo scientifico
CORDIS classifica i progetti con EuroSciVoc, una tassonomia multilingue dei campi scientifici, attraverso un processo semi-automatico basato su tecniche NLP.
CORDIS classifica i progetti con EuroSciVoc, una tassonomia multilingue dei campi scientifici, attraverso un processo semi-automatico basato su tecniche NLP.
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugs
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologytissue engineering
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinecardiologycardiovascular diseases
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Invito a presentare proposte
Vedi altri progetti per questo bandoBando secondario
H2020-LC-GD-2020-3
Meccanismo di finanziamento
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinatore
10129 Torino
Italia