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Content archived on 2024-06-18

Chiral veterinary medicines in the environment

Objective

Veterinary pharmaceuticals are potent environmental contaminants. Special attention has been paid to antibiotics because of their potential health risk. Research has been undertaken to understand their environmental fate and toxicity. However one very important phenomenon has been overlooked and it is that more than half of the drugs currently in use are chiral compounds. Chiral compounds can exist in the form of enantiomers, which have similar physicochemical properties but differ in their biological properties and, therefore, in their potency, toxicity and biodegradation. Because of the most of studies on chiral pharmaceuticals do not explicitly account for individual stereoisomers, they implicitly and incorrectly assumes that enantiomers have identical environmental behavior. Furthermore, there is also a lack of information concerning enantioselective toxicity of chiral pharmaceuticals in the environment. This might lead to a significant under- or overestimation of their toxicity, as well as, an incorrect environmental risk assessment.Trace analysis of pharmaceuticals in environmental samples is always challenging due to the complexity and diversity of sample matrices, and until today only few chiral analytical methods for environmental trace-level determinations have been developed being the most of them focus on a few pharmaceuticals, and none of them in a group of several veterinary pharmaceuticals of environmental relevance.
The proposal concerns the development and validation of a method for enantiomeric analysis of a group of chiral veterinary medicines of environmental relevance in environmental matrices using microextraction techniques and determination by liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry, the study of their environmental fate and their toxicity effects towards different organisms and the evaluation of the environmental risk posed by these compounds.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Call for proposal

FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF
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Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF BATH
EU contribution
€ 221 606,40
Address
CLAVERTON DOWN
BA2 7AY Bath
United Kingdom

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Region
South West (England) Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Bristol/Bath area Bath and North East Somerset, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data
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