Meet Venetios, a talented PhD candidate from Greece, currently conducting his research at AEIFORIA, an Italian spin-off.

In this interview, he shares insights into his groundbreaking thesis, "Assessing & Predicting the Fate of Model Pharmaceutical Compounds & Their Transformation Products in Soils and Towards Aquatic Systems".

Environmental and Health Challenges Addressed by Pharm-ERA

Global contamination of soil and aquatic ecosystems by pharmaceutical and microbiological pollutants (such as antimicrobial-resistant microorganisms and/or pathogens) raises severe concerns about impacts on ecosystem health and repercussions on humans and animals. Preserving ecosystems from adverse ecotoxicological effects of pharmaceuticals and their transformation products, and limiting the environmental spread of antimicrobial resistance and pathogens is imperative to reach several UN Sustainable Development Goals as well as the European Green Deal, Water Framework Directive and Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. In this context, the main scientific objective of Pharm-ERA is to develop and implement innovative concepts, methods and strategies to improve the monitoring and assessment of the environmental effects and risks of pharmaceuticals, their transformation products, antimicrobial resistances and pathogens from terrestrial to aquatic environments. The ultimate goal is to provide scientific evidence and expertise to contribute to reducing the environmental spread and impact of these chemical and microbiological contaminants and to preserve microbial diversity and functions across the soil-water-sediment continuum.

Venetios' Doctoral Project in the Framework of Pharm-ERA: Predicting and Monitoring Veterinary Pharmaceutical Contaminants in Soils and Waters

Veterinary pharmaceutical compounds (PhACs) and their transformation products (TPs) enter soil, then water bodies, through various routes imposing pollution, toxicity and selection pressure to the soil microbiota.
The main objective of the project is to develop a ready-to-use version of the TyPol tool for a priori estimation of veterinary PhACs TPs fate in soil and potential transfer to aquatic ecosystems, and to develop open access protocols for chemical analyses of selected PhACs & TPs in soils. To do so, this project is divided between experimental work, chemical analyses and statistical analyses.
At AEIFORIA, the hiring institution, field scale dissipation test will be performed for selected PhACs and their TPs, coupled to an in-lab degradation and plant uptake study. Analysis will be performed by LC-HRMS with previously validated methods. In cooperation with Chloën at UTH (Greece), the main TPs of pharmaceuticals in soil samples obtained by a microcosm study conducted at University of Thessaly, Greece, will be analyzed. Data obtained from lab, mesocosm and field scale will then be used during following secondments.
The secondment at INRAE Lyon will be focused on the search and identification methodology for suspected TPs. The method developed for pesticides (Rocco et al. 2022), based on LC-HRMS, will be adapted for a selection of PhACs The suspected analysis will be carried out on field samples. Comparisons of results with those obtained at AEIFORIA, using high-res MS/MS untargeted metabolomics coupled to ion mobility, will also be carried out.
The secondment at INRAE Palaiseau will be focused on the use and implementation of the TyPol (Typology of Pollutants) tool, developed to classify organic compounds, and their TPs, according to both their behaviour in the environment and their ecotoxicological effects, and their molecular properties (Servien et al., 2014). It is based on PLS regression and hierarchical clustering. TyPol can also be used to assess the fate and effects of an organic compound from its molecular properties by similarity with compounds having comparable properties, and for which environmental and ecotoxicological parameters are known (e.g., Benoit et al., 2017; Storck et al., 2016; Mamy et al., 2021).
In this PhD thesis, TyPol will be first combined with new analytical methods to identify and prioritize TPs to be investigated in a more comprehensive environmental risk assessment scheme. Then, an improved version of TyPol enabling a robust estimate of the fate of pharmaceutical TPs using the molecular properties of the TPs as main predictors will be developed. Finally, TyPol will be tested and validated by comparing in silico clustering results with laboratory measured data on the fate of TPs.