Project Explorer

Development of Biomonitoring Methods for Toxins(2008)

Project Description:
Biomonitoring methods for toxins develops and implements methods that monitor domoic acid, brevetoxin and ciguatoxin exposure and predictive outcome in living animals to provide early diagnosis that can reduce adverse effects of HAB toxins on human and marine animal populations. The biomonitoring research objective is rapid on-site testing of toxin in urine and detailed analysis of blood for toxin metabolites and panels of biomarkers to establish disease status. The issues addressed by this project are designed to match the needs that human and ecological health managers defined in HARRNESS, 2005. Harmful Algal Research and Response: A National Environmental Science Strategy 2005–2015. Specifically, these diagnostic methods will be used for research support (i.e., determine adverse effect levels of HAB toxins in humans and protected, threatened, and endangered species) and for clinical and wildlife diagnostic support (i.e. improve surveillance of human and marine animal exposure and disease). This research was identified to be needed by human and wildlife health managers because “currently, there are no readily available tools or methods for diagnosing HAB-related illnesses in humans or other animals. Thus, accurate diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis are impossible.” Biomonitoring methods for toxins addresses this need through development of simple to use methods to rapidly test urine samples on site for toxins as well as methods to collect and analyze blood for toxin metabolites and proteome biomarkers. Research is conducted to understand how these analytes reflect the outcome of the toxin disease. This project parallels the objective of the toxic impacts project to provide tools to monitor the predictive outcome of HAB toxin on long-term health effects with the goal to provide early warning to mitigate toxicity in human and marine animal populations.

Expected Outcome:
We expect that this project will establish tools to monitor domoic acid, brevetoxins and ciguatoxins in living animals and diagnostic tests to monitor the predicative longer-term outcome of toxin exposure. We expect that each class of toxin has parent compound or metabolites that are measurable in both urine and blood, and that sensitive tests will allow rapid testing to confirm toxin exposure both in humans and marine species. Blood has the potential to contain multiple markers, produced as liver secretory proteins, blood cell proteins or leakage from damaged organs that are reflective of disease status. Although no one marker by itself is likely to give a positive confirmation of toxin disease, panels of markers together with direct toxin measurement are likely to provide predicative capacity of disease outcome. This research will expand scientific understanding of the toxicokinetics, transport, distribution and elimination of algal toxins from several laboratory animal models and clinical and wildlife samples where available. It will advance science through expanding genome and proteome databases to include expression following toxin exposure. This project will impact coastal management issues by directly engaging public health and wildlife managers to utilize emerging biomonitoring methods to evaluate toxin exposure. This project will benefit coastal science by providing more timely analysis of toxin exposure and relevant information to coastal managers and provide new insights on the interaction of the coastal ecosystem with marine animal and human health. Coastal residents will benefit from methods that can easily quickly detect toxin levels and provide early diagnosis to expedite treatment to reduce adverse effects. Likewise the results will be used by managers to refine surveillance methods and predict socioeconomic outcomes of harmful algal bloom events.