LISTEN TO SCIENCE DICTION
Chemicals create everything in our world from the air we breathe to flame retardants in your carpet and from nutritional supplements to shampoo. But how do we know they’re safe? In Episode 15, Environmental Exposure, we look at the data that supports public health, whether eliminating risk is possible, and how researchers keep up with an estimated 2,000 new chemicals that are introduced each year.
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Erin Merritt
Chemical elements like carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen are the building blocks of life. Scan the periodic table and there are 118 of these elements known to science and in the right combinations, Dr. Kristin Aillon is a program manager who leads a team responsible for evaluating the possible health effects of the chemicals that we’re exposed to daily, helping ensure the health and safety of people around the world. Today on the show, Environmental Exposure, the data that supports public health, whether eliminating risk is possible, and how researchers keep up with an estimated 2,000 new chemicals that are introduced each year. I’m Erin Merritt and this is Science Diction from MRIGlobal.
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
Chemicals that serve different functions, they’re used to make foods and food containers, clothing, furniture, personal care and consumer products like your cosmetics and lotions and sunscreens and soaps. You name it, they’re everywhere. The problem is, is that there is little or no scientific data on whether these chemicals are safe.
Erin Merritt
Are they not regulated?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
They are not regulated at all. Like the Food and Drug Administration or the FDA would evaluate a pharmaceutical or medicine that you knowingly would take. These are chemicals in the environment that are being inhaled or they’re absorbed through your skin or ingested, if you put your fingers in your mouth, or they leach from your water bottle or container that you were storing your food in. When the exposures are at high levels, they can make you quickly sick and that can trigger maybe a response that it would be like, okay, we need to study the toxicological effects of those chemicals, but in this case, these are the chemicals and substances that we are exposed to at very low levels and that they don’t make you sick instantly, but they’re still affecting your overall health.
Erin Merritt
Would you say these chemicals are some that most people are familiar with?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
So bisphenol A or BPA is probably something that many people are familiar with, and it’s a good example of how environmental exposure studies have historically been carried out. Since the 1960s, BPA has been widely used in food packaging like plastic containers and even some metal can liners. Over time, there was concern that BPA was leaching into the food and that we were actually consuming low levels of BPA and there was scientific data coming to light on the possible hazards of BPA. In 2012, the FDA actually banned the use of BPA in manufacturing baby bottles and sippy cups and further infant formula packaging materials in 2013.
But if you fast forward to now, while consumer interest has moved into the next potential new hazard, scientists are still hard at work collecting data and information for what happens to BPA in the body, like what concentrations cause tox effects? Do those concentrations correlate to our exposure in adults and children? What are the variables that affect the amount of chemical that we’re exposed to? All these sorts of questions are not just for BPA itself, but also for other BPA related compounds. Unfortunately, it’s a long process to get all of the variables and questions answered that we need to fully assess a chemical’s safety.
Erin Merritt
How does your work then support that effort in public health?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
We use our advanced analytical equipment to help collect data for our customers’ ongoing environmental exposure studies, whether it’s sourcing, procuring, and storing study chemicals at appropriate conditions, characterizing the chemicals, developing methods to formulate the chemicals into vehicles that mimic exposure, or analyzing biological samples to see what concentrations of the study chemicals are in the body or what the body’s doing to these chemicals like metabolizing them and how long the chemical stays in the body. We also help our customers who are focused on eliminating these hazardous chemicals from the environment, whether it’s testing to see if their technologies are working or the science behind how those technologies work and do they work without further consequences like harmful byproducts?
Erin Merritt
How is the data produced by your team then used by manufacturers or the clients?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
The data produced in our laboratories is part of the big picture of assessing chemical safety and environmental exposure. It can be used to publish articles and scientific journals or public forums to inform the public of exposure safety and can also be used while informing the government agencies in making decisions regarding public health regulations.
Erin Merritt
Lots of products on the market can be harmful. Is your work all about limiting risk as opposed to eliminating it?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
Well, it’s almost impossible to completely eliminate the risk. Take water – heavy metals are present in water that we drink and some are known to be toxic. Our focus is on making sure that there’s scientifically supported thresholds in place that these chemicals do not exceed to cause harm. So limiting risk and educating the public is more of what our work is about.
Erin Merritt
Each year an estimated 2,000 new chemicals are introduced into the products we use daily, and there is little to no toxicological data regarding their safety for use.
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
A lot of efforts and information is needed to really fully assess the risk of even one chemical or class of chemicals and it takes even up to decades worth of work. Even further, studying one chemical at a time does not really solve the problems that environmental exposures pose. As we’re exposed to thousands of chemicals daily, you have to imagine that some toxicological effects probably arise from synergistic effects of multiple chemicals and chemical types. Development of faster and more efficient methods, where multiple chemical classes can be studied simultaneously, is critical to determine the risk.
Erin Merritt
Can you tell me more about the efforts to increase this throughput?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
To this end, a lot of efforts have been made to move to more novel or new alternative models. These are cell-based toxicological models like microfluidic devices, organ on a chip, and also computational and predictive modeling, things like that, always that increase the throughput through the analysis. This certainly takes screening for possibly hazardous chemicals to the next level as far as getting information out much faster.
Erin Merritt
Is there a chemical that is especially of interest to the public today?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
Yes, there is. “Forever chemicals”—also known as perfluoro and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS chemicals. These are synthetic or manmade, and that came about around the 1950s as a way to keep food from sticking to products like your pots and pans for instance. It’s also what makes fabrics like your furniture, carpets, and clothes stain resistant. It was basically a solution to make your life easier in everyday situations.
Erin Merritt
You called them “forever chemicals?”
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
Yes, these chemicals are basically chains of carbon and fluorine bonds, which makes them very strong and resistant to degradation, hence the name “forever chemicals.” With the resistance to degradation, PFAS chemicals are known to bioaccumulate, meaning the body can’t get rid of them faster than the exposure. They’ve been found to leak into the soil and they’re in the water, they’re in the air, they’re everywhere, and exposure is pretty much inevitable. And just this year in April, the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, they set standards or the threshold for permissible levels of six PFAS chemicals in drinking water.
Erin Merritt
Does this possible exposure and current interest in PFAS change the focus of your work at MRIGlobal?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
It doesn’t really change the focus or the endpoints of our work, but it certainly strengthens the need for those higher throughput assays and predictive models. There are so many products with PFAS and some with many different types of PFAS chemicals. It’s critical to get tox information out as soon as possible so that we catch potential hazards more efficiently while still maintaining the scientific integrity of the data.
Erin Merritt
As a scientist, what is it about toxicology that interests you so much?
Kristin Aillon, Ph.D.
As a scientist, I’m very driven to analytically find solutions to problems, especially those related to human health and safety. And I want my work to make an impact. Environmental exposures is a very complex problem that presents new challenges with every class of compounds. It affects us all, but personally to me, it is about my children and their future. Doing this work in the laboratory and with my team, I’m doing my absolute best as a researcher and a parent to keep my kids safe.