Young toxicology researcher honored for conference contribution
At the conference of the Society for Environmental Mutation Research (GUM), Lea Thibol, a doctoral student in the Department of Chemistry, was awarded the prize for the best presented poster. Lea Thibol is a researcher in Professor Jörg Fahrer's working group in the area of study Food Chemistry and Toxicology. As part of her doctoral thesis, she is developing a test system in human cell cultures to detect carcinogenic substances as a substitute for animal testing.
Carcinogenic chemical substances can be divided into two classes based on their effect. The first class of chemical substances primarily damages the genome, i.e. our genes, and thus leads to cancer. These are therefore referred to as genotoxic carcinogens. In contrast, the second class of carcinogenic substances focuses on other processes, such as an increased rate of cell division and the activation of certain signaling pathways that ultimately trigger cancer. These substances are called non-genotoxic carcinogens. While numerous established test methods exist for the first class of substances, such non-genotoxic carcinogens can so far only be detected in long-term animal studies.
Ms. Thibol's doctoral project is part of the EU-funded PARC project ("Partnership for the Risk Assessment of Chemicals") and is part of a larger consortium. The doctoral thesis aims to record relevant processes of carcinogenesis in human intestinal cell models using a combination of different analytical methods. This test procedure should help to identify non-toxic carcinogenic chemicals in the future without the use of animal testing.
With her poster at the GUM conference, which recently took place in Ludwigshafen, Ms. Thibol presented her promising results to date. She analyzed a variety of chemical compounds of both carcinogenic substance classes in human intestinal cell models. To this end, she successfully used biochemical-toxicological, cell biological and imaging methods. For the presentation of her data, Lea Thibol won the €200 poster prize of the GUM, a specialist society that deals with genetic damage caused by environmental influences in the context of carcinogenesis.
Questions answered:
Prof. Dr. Jörg Fahrer
Area of study Food Chemistry and Toxicology
Department of Chemistry
Tel.: 0631 205-2974
E-mail: joerg.fahrer(at)chem.rptu.de