Drugs
Coordinator: Dr Chen Situ
Pharmaceutical drugs are used extensively in modern Agri-food industries in order to produce enough food to meet the ever-increasing global demand. Besides their primary duties of prevention and treatment of various diseases, veterinary therapeutics such as antibiotics and anabolic steroids are often used and abused to increase the growth rates of treated animals. Such practices may result in multiple contaminants or mixtures of hazardous chemicals entering the food chain. The consumption of antibiotic contaminated food can result in severe, even fatal human illness such as allergic reaction. The biggest concern associated with the widespread uses of chemical drugs is the development of pathogenic bacteria with multiple resistances to commonly used antibiotic therapies in human medicine that will have significant impact on public health and economic consequences. An EU-wide ban of growth promoting uses of hormones and antibiotics has resulted since 1988 and 2006.
Objectives of drug research:
- Development of sensitive and reliable methods for rapid detection and determination of various drugs and their residues in foods and feed
- Research to exploit natural alternatives to antimicrobials that can be used in food and animal production
Chemical contaminant monitoring in foodstuffs is a highly important and complex issue. The work is led by Dr Situ (c.situ@qub.ac.uk) who has extensive research experience in this area. The world-renowned drug research team at Queen’s University has been at the forefront of developing innovative rapid methods and utilizing various emerging new technologies for food safety and quality monitoring. We have developed and validated a wide range of bioanalytical techniques to detect and prevent the use of illegal antibiotic growth promoters in food of animal origin. We have first demonstrated the applicability of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor technology for multi-analyte high-throughput analysis of drug residues (FoodSENSE, EC-funded FP4 project) which has now been proved to be a valuable tool for rapid detection of potential harmful contaminants and chemical residues in food. As a result of Feedstuffs-RADIUS, an EC-funded FP5 project which Dr Situ was the principal scientist responsible for the development of new screening method of the project, a commercial multi-antibiotic test kit was launched in 2005 for rapid detection of a range of ban antibiotics in feedstuffs. This project has been viewed as one the top FP5 projects by the European Commission.
http://ec.europa.eu/research/agriculture/success_control_banned_antibiotic_en.htm
The level of knowledge of different technology platforms and their potential applications in many areas of food and nutrition sciences are reflected by a substantial number of ongoing national and international collaborative research activities. Strong research collaborations have been established with leading university departments, government institutions, research centers and industrial companies worldwide: Utrecht University and Institute of Food Safety (RIKILT), Netherlands, Gent University and Liege University, Belgium, University of Zurich, Switzerland, Turku University, Finland, National Veterinary School, France, Teagasc, Dublin, GE Healthcare, Sweden, Euro-Diagnostica, Netherlands, Neogen, USA and Eurofins, Germany. Substantial findings have been received from the European Commission, GE Healthcare, Invest NI, Nestle, and Safefood.
Major Scientific Outputs
- C. Situ, E. Grutters, P. van Wichen, C.T. Elliott (2006). A collaborative trial to evaluate the performance of a multi-antibiotic enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for screening five banned antimicrobial growth promoters in animal feedingstuffs. Analytica Chimica Acta, 561: 62-68.
- Christof Van Poucke, Frédéric Dumoulin, Shirish Yakkundi, Chen Situ, Chris T. Elliott, Ellen M. Grutters, Ron Verheijen, Robert Schilt, Sune Eriksson and Carlos Van Peteghem (2006). Banned antibacterial growth promoters in animal feed: Collaborative trial on the liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry method developed in the feedstuffs-radius project. Analytica Chimica Acta, 557: 204-210.
