Key messages

This project makes human biomonitoring datasets more accessible and reusable for science and regulation by preparing and sharing them as FAIR resources – findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – while respecting the sensitivity of personal data. We built practical enablers – harmonised metadata, schema mappings, and search – to increase findability and interoperability across disciplines and support cross‑domain linking. Governed access pathways allow researchers and risk assessors to reuse individual‑level datasets alongside core occurrence data, enabling robust exposure distributions, comparisons with guidance values, time‑trend evaluation, and exposure-effect analyses. Strong data governance (informed consent, access committees, and pseudonymisation) and privacy‑preserving handling uphold ethical and legal rights while encouraging responsible reuse; aggregated outputs are published where appropriate. By linking human biomonitoring with health, environmental, and lifestyle information, and aligning with European initiatives, the project helps translate high‑quality evidence into better chemical risk assessment models and tools, ultimately supporting public‑health‑oriented policies.

Overview

This project focuses on making human biomonitoring datasets more accessible and reusable for scientific and regulatory purposes. The goal is to ensure that these datasets are prepared and shared as FAIR datasets ↗, meaning they are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. This approach helps researchers and regulators use the data effectively.  

Human biomonitoring datasets, which track chemicals and their effects in human bodies, pose challenges for reuse as they contain sensitive personal information requiring careful attention to ethical and legal issues. For example, maximising the scientific and regulatory value of the data required analyses on individual data points, maintaining the coherence of the dataset, and linking the data to other types of information, such as health, environmental, and lifestyle data. Additionally, human biomonitoring datasets often contain chemical measurements for which no standardised naming or identification systems exist, making them harder to use across different studies.

The project will make human biomonitoring datasets available to scientific users, who can reuse entire datasets, regulatory bodies, which might use the data to assess chemical risks and improve models and tools for environmental and public health policies, and the public, who might benefit from summaries or insights derived from the data.  

By doing this, the project indirectly supports multiple regulatory frameworks and aims to improve human risk assessment.

One of the broader impacts of the project is developing solutions to allow sensitive personal data to be reused while still safeguarding legal and ethical rights. This includes linking data across different domains—such as health, environment, and consumption—ensuring the systems used to analyse and share data can work together seamlessly.  

By tackling these challenges, this project aims to make human biomonitoring data more useful, while respecting the privacy and rights of individuals whose data is included. 

Achievements & Results

The final content, including outcomes, achievements, and actionable insights, will be published upon completion of the project.

Policy relevance

This project provides policymakers and regulators with a readily reusable evidence base to assess population exposures to chemicals, identify vulnerable groups, track time trends, and compare with guidance values. This supports targeted measures and evaluation of effectiveness of public health policies.