Monitoring Primary Effects of Pharmaceuticals in the Aquatic Environment with Mode of Action-Specific in Vitro Biotests

摘要

The continuously growing and aging world population and the intensified livestock farming worldwide are expected to raise the global consumption and the number of human and veterinary pharmaceuticals on the market in the future. As a result, pharmaceuticals that are incompletely removed by wastewater treatment will occur in higher concentrations and in immense multiplicity in the water cycle. Except for synthetic steroid hormones, environmental monitoring of pharmaceuticals still remains to be based upon analytical chemistry of single substances which is incapable to encompass entities of pharmaceutical compounds with, for example, the same mode of action (MOA) at once, and thus will soon be overstrained by the sheer number of compounds, metabolites, and new product developments. For all the major classes of pharmaceuticals, we will therefore need MOA-based cell culture assays that report on the immediate interaction of compounds with their specific molecular target and, thus, on possible effects on organisms in the environment.