Projects Profile
Project Title
Biotreatment of estrogen – a model for the biodegradation of pharmaceutical products and associated wastes
Partnership
Prof Ken Bruce, King’s College London
Prof Hongqiang Ren,Nanjing University
Project Aim
King’s and Nanjing partners are expert in their areas, and are combining their expertise to develop research collaboration in this field and to derive a functioning platform system. This will allow not only the development of a functional system for the degradation of estrogens, but will serve as a paradigm for the deployment in subsequent applications for the removal of the wide range of problematic pharmaceuticals in wastewater. Firstly, the team is aiming to establish methodologies to quantify the range of estrogenic compounds in the laboratory. Secondly, the team will identify the optimal combination of estrogen-degrading bacterial species. This will be achieved via both aerobic and anaerobic incubations of bacteria derived from environmental sources (e.g. sewage sludge) using different quantities and mixtures of estrogenic compounds present as the sole energy source. Finally the project will derive pure cultures of bacteria that show the highest rates of estrogen transformation and whose activity is synergistically enhanced by their interaction. The technology developed will be targeted on long term practical application and for further commercial exploration.
Inspiration for the projects
Concern over the release of pharmaceutically active compounds such as estrogen into the environment is increasing. This is largely because the current methods of water treatment used are not designed to remove estrogens. Estrogen, a family of compounds has a significant impact on health and the environment we are living in. which is known to feminise a range of animal species in many habitats, causing serious social concern. Moreover, the use of hormonal therapy, one of the main sources of “inadvertent” release shows no sign of stopping. Accordingly, concern is increasingly being shown by regulators over the release of such compounds. Currently, the removal of such pollutants from wastewater representing an unmet technology gap for the water treatment industry, and some of the compounds, e.g. diethylstilbestrol – one of the estrogen family of compounds – has been regarded as a U-list pharmaceutical as part of the US Federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Having established the importance of the compound in terms of environmental, social and increasingly regulatory terms, it is equally important to outline how such compounds can be deal with and removed from the prime environment. In this project King’s and Nanjing Universities are working together to establish a system of biotreatment that builds on the partners’ two key strengths on pharmaceutical sciences and waste water treatment.
In this project King’s experts will derive a model consortium of bacteria that are able to efficiently biotransform estrogenic compounds into inactive metabololites, which will be complimented by the Nanjing’s expertise in water and wastewater filter technology, who will iteratively scale up the growth of this consortium into a full scale technological solution to the estrogen problem. By so doing, we will establish a functional platform for treating a potentially wide-range of recalcitrant, bioactive, wastewater pollutants and for further commercial exploration.
Commercial Potential and Further Development
The project will produce commercial prototype waste water treatment demonstration for pharmaceutical active compounds removal, particularly the estrogens. An appropriate biodegradation method and processed will be developed and optimised. The market need, competitive advantages for the technology will also be assessed and the commercialization routes investigated.
The project is aiming at addressing an unmet technology need in treating the pharmaceutical active compounds/ pollutants which have wider impact on the health of the habitants, hence have significant socio-economic and environmental benefits. The technology under development has attracted significant interests from industry and showed huge commercialization potential.
