A database on pharmaceuticals in the environment: What do stakeholders need?

Abstract

Pharmaceutical pollution has raised concerns about how these contaminants affect ecosystems. Data to assess the environmental risk of pharmaceuticals exist but are dispersed and not always publicly accessible. To address this issue, the European Commission recently proposed to develop a data source for human medicinal products, involving relevant stakeholders, including healthcare and industry representatives. The aim of our study was to define the user requirements for such a database on pharmaceuticals in the environment (PiE). We reached out to over 100 professionals that work on PiE, asking what data should be incorporated in the database and what features it should have. The results show that most stakeholders are affected by data gaps, mainly related to ecotoxicity, monitoring, transformation products, metabolites and removal rates in wastewater treatment plants. Interest in the mechanism of action of active pharmaceutical ingredients was specifically expressed by the pharma sector, including stakeholders related to the authorisation, production and use of medicines. Researchers and stakeholders dealing with environmental and water quality have greater interest for mass spectrum data, modelled environmental concentrations and data on transformation products and metabolites. While showing that the key actors working on PiE strongly endorse the development of an accessible and transparent database, we provide recommendations for creating such a data repository on pharmaceuticals.