Emma Elisabeth Wincent

INQUIRE aims to protect citizen health by providing knowledge, tools, and measures to substantially improve indoor air quality (IAQ). We will conduct research and evaluate innovative actions to reduce hazardous chemical and biological determinants in homes, positively impacting the health of residents. INQUIRE will focus particularly on infants and young children (<5 years old) as highly sensitive groups that spend a substantial time in the home environment. INQUIRE will comprehensively advance our understanding of the determinants of IAQ in homes by implementing innovative, low-cost, non-invasive sampling strategies (sensors, indoor/outdoor passive sampling, urine biomonitoring) to characterize determinants of household IAQ and their importance to human exposure. To capture the breath of IAQ determinants across Europe, the study will monitor for one month over 200 homes distributed across 8 countries, covering a gradient of conditions in each country. Tiered high-resolution chemical and biological screening techniques and wide-scope holistic characterisation of hazards will provide a comprehensive assessment of the determinants of IAQ. Multifaceted data analysis techniques (including machine learning, exposure modelling, geospatial analysis), will link chemical, biological and toxicity profiles with drivers of IAQ to identify sources and prioritize pollutants. Source identification will feed directly into the testing of both novel technologies and readily deployable strategies to improve IAQ, resulting in evidence-based recommendations and a draft of policy strategy for developing IAQ standards. INQUIREs Open Science approach and generated FAIR data on hazardous determinants, their effects, risk factors and sources will endorse continuous exploitation of results. Open dissemination of generated knowledge will raise citizen awareness while exploitation by industry and policy makers will endorse a transition towards homes with zero pollution. The project INQUIRE is part of the European cluster on indoor air quality and health, IDEAL.

Identification and assessment endocrine disrupting substances (EDs) is an important issue for meeting the global Sustainable Development Goals and the Swedish Environmental Objective for a non-toxic environment. Regulatory health risk assessment of EDs is complex and currently requires extensive animal testing to identify toxicological effects, as well as a high level of understanding concerning the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms. The purpose of this project is to make use of mechanistic data from novel in silico and in vitro models to develop and evaluate a novel mechanism-based approach for the assessment of EDs. A strength of the project is that we will combine methods, data and expertise from several ongoing projects and research activities. We will use Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) methodology to connect data on molecular and cellular mechanisms to health effects on the organism level that are relevant for humans. AOP-networks that describe different mechanisms for endocrine disruption leading to developmental toxicity will be developed and used in case studies with specific model substances to investigate how mechanistic data can be used to draw conclusions about adverse health effects. Apart from contributing new knowledge that can be used to improve testing and assessment of EDs, this project also has the potential of creating new and constructive synergies between ongoing research activities.