SafeChem
Project description
Safe Chem!

The Safe Chem! project aims at allowing the assessment of chemical impacts from pharma medicines on ecosystems and measure them against global biodiversity targets, and reducing chemical ecotoxicity and related biodiversity loss in an absolute environmental sustainability perspective.

Safe Chem!

Background & project objective

The Safe Chem! will provide a scientifically robust method and user-friendly tool to assess pharma medicines’ chemical impacts on ecosystems, and to measure these impacts against global biodiversity targets. This will help design pharma medicines that are absolutely sustainable – not just getting better than before but becoming good enough in support to combating global biodiversity loss.

The project builds on the global reference model USEtox, which is endorsed by UNEP, and which is widely used by governments and industry, it is adopted across all sectors, and it covers already many 1000 chemicals. With that, the project aims at creating a blueprint for other sectors to assess ecotoxicity impacts on biodiversity worldwide.

Safe Chem!
Safe Chem!

Project output

Main expected project output and results can be found in below table.

Output titleFurther description
Inventory of curated, high-quality ecotoxicity dataSet of ecotoxicity effect test data for chemicals relevant for pharma sector, processed to be proposed for inclusion into the USEtox model’s organic substances database
Operational data curation protocol for ecotoxicity test dataData curation procedure systematically applied to all raw ecotoxicity test data for conversion into an input dataset from which ecotoxicity effect factors can be generated according to global recommendations (Owsianiak et al. 2023).
Ecotoxicity impact profiles & biodiversity benchmarks for pharma chemicalsApplication of ecotoxicity effect factors to pharma chemicals within the USEtox model framework, and relating respective impact pressure profiles to ecosystem pressure benchmarks.
Recommendations on pharma medicine ecotoxicity impacts & reduction optionsComparison and ranking of different pharma chemicals impact profiles and recommendations for reducing related environmental impact on ecosystems.
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