PARC Projects

Provide protection against most harmful chemicals
Establishing health-based human biomonitoring guidance values
Human health
Human biomonitoring
Risk assessment
Time span
-
Potential impacts
  • Enabling direct comparison of survey data from European countries with the agreed values, facilitating harmonised risk assessments across Europe.
  • Developing impact indicators using guidance values to represent physical exposure levels and potential health risks in a clear, accessible format, expanding public understanding.
  • Serving as a foundation for assessing risks associated with chemical mixtures, ensuring that they remain safe for people and the environment.
Partners involved
UBA (DE)
ANSES (FR)
AUTH (GR)
LNS (LU)
MOH (IL)
NIJZ (SI)
NIPH (NO)
SECO (CH)
SRU (NL)
TTL (FI)
UOULU (FI)
Contacts
Petra Apel (UBA)
petra.apel [at] uba.de
Key messages
  • Developing three sets of health-based Human Biomonitoring Guidance Values helps to interpret biomonitoring results for the general population and workers.
  • Human Biomonitoring Guidance Values are created for substances with a clear threshold where health effects occur. For carcinogenic substances that don’t have a safe threshold, special values called Exposure Equivalents for Cancer Risk are developed in certain cases.
  • These guidance values will make it easier to assess chemical exposures and protect the health of different groups. 
Overview

This project aims to develop guidance values for human biomonitoring of priority chemical substances, using measurable biomarkers of exposure as a foundation for accurately interpreting potential health impacts. Biomarkers of exposure are substances in the body, such as chemicals or their breakdown products, that indicate whether and how much someone has been exposed to a chemical. The human biomonitoring guidance values, developed through collaborative consensus within the Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC) project, will standardise the assessment of human biomonitoring results and support European chemicals policies.  

To enable a health-related interpretation of human biomonitoring results, human biomonitoring guidance values must be derived from epidemiological or toxicological data and correspond directly to measurable human exposure biomarkers. Epidemiological data refers to data or evidence relating to the occurrence, distribution, clinical characteristics, and control of disease within a group of people while toxicological data are used to evaluate the potential harm or hazard of a chemical. The main aim of this project is to create as many guidance values as possible for priority chemicals identified by PARC and measured in the Aligned Studies.  

Through the consensual approach, broad acceptance and promotion of the harmonised assessment of human biomonitoring results should be ensured. The guidance values for both the general population and worker groups are derived according to the agreed human biomonitoring guidance value methodology. However, ongoing refinement of this strategy will be incorporated as new data emerge. In certain cases, molecular modelling—a computer-based method for predicting how chemicals behave in the body—may be required, and corresponding results will be made available within PARC. Each human biomonitoring guidance value will include a confidence level, which indicates the degree of certainty about the value’s accuracy. 

Achievements & Results

The first values and associated substance dossiers are currently being finalised. The substances included in this initial release are:

  • DHHB (diethylamino hydroxybenzoyl hexyl benzoate, Uvinul® A Plus
  • (Gamma/Lambda) Cyhalothrin
  • Benzophenone-3
  • Diisononyl Phthalate (DiNP)
  • Diethylhexyl Terephthalate (DEHTP)
  • Aluminium
  • Nickel
  • Chromium VI
  • Mercury
  • Acetamiprid
  • Imidacloprid 
Policy relevance

The evaluation of European human biomonitoring results with the help of harmonised guidance values makes it possible to check legal chemical regulation on their sufficiency or needs of improvement. 

Related Publications

A benchmark dataset for machine learning in ecotoxicology
A benchmark dataset for machine learning in ecotoxicology copied to clipboard
Authors
Schür Christoph, Gasser Lilian, Perez-Cruz Fernando, Schirmer Kristin, Baity-Jesi Marco
Journal
Nature Scientific Data
Vol. 10
No. 718 (2023)
Keywords
Machine learning, Ecotoxicology, Benchmark, Scientificdata, Fish, Algae, Crustaceans, Predictive toxicology, Hazard assessment, Models
Date of publication
copied to clipboard
1/3

Machine learning has the potential to supplement, if not replace animal experiments for hazard assessment

2/3

To progress, the field needs better comparability across studies, which can be achieved through commonly used benchmark datasets

3/3

We provide an expertly-curated benchmark dataset for acute mortality in fish, crustaceans, and algae

1/1

The work enables us to benchmark our modeling efforts against other people's work and forms the basis of two papers focused on regulatory case studies of applying machine learning to ecotoxicology to predict chemical toxicity in aquatic species.

The use of machine learning for predicting ecotoxicological outcomes is promising, but underutilized. The curation of data with informative features requires both expertise in machine learning as well as a strong biological and ecotoxicological background, which we consider a barrier of entry for this kind of research. Additionally, model performances can only be compared across studies when the same dataset, cleaning, and splittings were used. Therefore, we provide ADORE, an extensive and well-described dataset on acute aquatic toxicity in three relevant taxonomic groups (fish, crustaceans, and algae). The core dataset describes ecotoxicological experiments and is expanded with phylogenetic and species-specific data on the species as well as chemical properties and molecular representations. Apart from challenging other researchers to try and achieve the best model performances across the whole dataset, we propose specific relevant challenges on subsets of the data and include datasets and splittings corresponding to each of these challenge as well as in-depth characterization and discussion of train-test splitting approaches.

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Establishing health-based human biomonitoring guidance values

Time span
-
Potential impacts
  • Enabling direct comparison of survey data from European countries with the agreed values, facilitating harmonised risk assessments across Europe.
  • Developing impact indicators using guidance values to represent physical exposure levels and potential health risks in a clear, accessible format, expanding public understanding.
  • Serving as a foundation for assessing risks associated with chemical mixtures, ensuring that they remain safe for people and the environment.
UBA (DE)
ANSES (FR)
AUTH (GR)
LNS (LU)
MOH (IL)
NIJZ (SI)
NIPH (NO)
SECO (CH)
SRU (NL)
TTL (FI)
UOULU (FI)
Key messages
  • Developing three sets of health-based Human Biomonitoring Guidance Values helps to interpret biomonitoring results for the general population and workers.
  • Human Biomonitoring Guidance Values are created for substances with a clear threshold where health effects occur. For carcinogenic substances that don’t have a safe threshold, special values called Exposure Equivalents for Cancer Risk are developed in certain cases.
  • These guidance values will make it easier to assess chemical exposures and protect the health of different groups. 
Overview

This project aims to develop guidance values for human biomonitoring of priority chemical substances, using measurable biomarkers of exposure as a foundation for accurately interpreting potential health impacts. Biomarkers of exposure are substances in the body, such as chemicals or their breakdown products, that indicate whether and how much someone has been exposed to a chemical. The human biomonitoring guidance values, developed through collaborative consensus within the Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC) project, will standardise the assessment of human biomonitoring results and support European chemicals policies.  

To enable a health-related interpretation of human biomonitoring results, human biomonitoring guidance values must be derived from epidemiological or toxicological data and correspond directly to measurable human exposure biomarkers. Epidemiological data refers to data or evidence relating to the occurrence, distribution, clinical characteristics, and control of disease within a group of people while toxicological data are used to evaluate the potential harm or hazard of a chemical. The main aim of this project is to create as many guidance values as possible for priority chemicals identified by PARC and measured in the Aligned Studies.  

Through the consensual approach, broad acceptance and promotion of the harmonised assessment of human biomonitoring results should be ensured. The guidance values for both the general population and worker groups are derived according to the agreed human biomonitoring guidance value methodology. However, ongoing refinement of this strategy will be incorporated as new data emerge. In certain cases, molecular modelling—a computer-based method for predicting how chemicals behave in the body—may be required, and corresponding results will be made available within PARC. Each human biomonitoring guidance value will include a confidence level, which indicates the degree of certainty about the value’s accuracy. 

Achievements & Results

The first values and associated substance dossiers are currently being finalised. The substances included in this initial release are:

  • DHHB (diethylamino hydroxybenzoyl hexyl benzoate, Uvinul® A Plus
  • (Gamma/Lambda) Cyhalothrin
  • Benzophenone-3
  • Diisononyl Phthalate (DiNP)
  • Diethylhexyl Terephthalate (DEHTP)
  • Aluminium
  • Nickel
  • Chromium VI
  • Mercury
  • Acetamiprid
  • Imidacloprid 
Policy relevance

The evaluation of European human biomonitoring results with the help of harmonised guidance values makes it possible to check legal chemical regulation on their sufficiency or needs of improvement. 

Contacts
Petra Apel (UBA)
petra.apel [at] uba.de
Topics
Provide protection against most harmful chemicals
Keywords
Human health
Human biomonitoring
Risk assessment

Related Projects

Leveraging HBM4EU data for chemical safety and zero pollution in Europe
Developing toxicity roadmaps
Closing data gaps in physiologically-based kinetic modeling and quantitative in vitro to in vivo extrapolation
Enhancing the risk assessment of chemical mixtures
Harmonisation of the risk assessment of chemicals