Our vision is to become a world leader in research into environmental and other factors (the so-called exposome) affecting human health, life and aging, thereby contributing to the development of innovative approaches to environmental and health protection and tools to prevent, diagnose and solve related problems. We want to contribute to scientific cooperation in environmental and health research within the European Research Area, to eliminate inconsistencies in existing environmental and health data in Europe, to make more efficient use of available data and knowledge to improve risk assessment and management, chemical management, to create and modify regulations and legislation based on evidence, data and policy making in a variety of sectors for better health protection.
We support the development of innovative health policies, the provision of better healthcare, while strengthening industrial competitiveness by developing new biomarkers of exposure, effects and sensitivity, improved analytical techniques, modeling approaches and software tools with the main objective of minimizing the impact of disease related to exposure of populations to toxic substances in the environment, reducing the future health costs of chronic conditions and improving the health and well-being of European citizens.
Our research teams are grouped into five research programs:
The research programme focuses on understanding the mechanisms and processes affecting the emissions and fate of chemicals in the environment and further expands its interest in study of the exposure of individuals and populations to the environment in order to provide tools for common interpretation of data from environmental monitoring and human biomonitoring networks.
The new research program deals with biomarkers of exposure, effect and sensitivity of individual organisms, and other factors such as socio-economic determinants of health, nutrition or physical activity. In this context, we are strengthening technology capabilities for omics analyses, biobanking capacities and developing a bioinformatics platform to support the interpretation of multi-omics and epidemiological data.
Programme focuses on the environmental impacts of both acute and chronic chemical exposures. We use the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) combining modeling and testing strategies to predict the environmental impacts of complex chemical mixtures. We investigate combined exposures to various factors that, based on individual susceptibility, can significantly contribute to an individual's excessive burden and lead to the development of pathologies.
The programme focuses on the development of new photoactivatable systems and supramolecular carriers as specific systems that exhibit specific biological activities or serve as auxiliary systems for biological or medical applications.
The research programme has been dealing with the basic principles of enzymatic catalysis and development of protein and cellular biocatalysts for environmental, chemical and biomedical applications. The program uses protein engineering, synthetic biology and analysis of large data stored in genomic databases to develop and prepare useful catalysts.