• Endocrine Disruptors Chemicals
• Reproductive Toxicity
• Thyroid

This project aims at improving the risk assessment procedure currently adopted for the endocrine
disrupting chemicals (EDCs), focusing in particular on those contained in food contact materials and
articles and affecting thyroid homeostasis and Male/Female Human Reproductive System. EDCs
generally display a complex toxicity profile, thus making toxicological evaluation and health risk
assessment difficult to achieve. The current standardized methods are rather insufficient to identify
and test their complex toxicity, and the application of traditional risk assessment principles may be
problematic for this kind of substances. This issue is even more crucial when ECDs are part of food
contact materials and articles, which are commonly used by the whole population. The increasingly
wider distribution of these products on the global market raised the exposure of consumers to
chemical agents on constant and cumulative basis, even for persistent compounds, highlighting the
urgency of governing the matter. A number of lists including chemicals exploited for the
manufacture of food contact materials and articles have been drawn up by international regulators
and public and private bodies. However, besides far from being harmonized, they do not provide
systematic information regarding thyroid disrupting properties. Actually, the awareness of science
on the thyroid and Male/Female Human Reproductive System safety profile of compounds
intentionally used in the food planet is still limited and fragmented, thus requiring an intensive
research activity to fill the existing knowledge gap. We carried out a thoroughly survey of the
available databases of chemicals for food contact materials and articles, selecting sixteen EDCs
characterized by a high level of uncertainty concerning the toxicological profile and/or dearth of
information on human exposure data. The selected compounds have been investigated by making
use of an experimental mapping procedure. The outcome of the experimental mapping procedure
on the compounds selected allowed us to move forward to perform new experiment by
computational tools and in vitro and in vivo studies, to ascertain their adverse thyroid and
Male/Female Human Reproductive System effects. The resulting outcomes will allow to achieve a
reliable risk assessment for the benefit of entire population.