Ana Margarida Araújo

University of Porto | UP

3,4-Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) is one of the most popular cathinone derivatives worldwide and has recently been associated with several intoxications and deaths, in which, similarly to amphetamines, hyperthermia appears to play a prominent role. However, there remains a huge information gap underlying the mechanisms associated with its hepat...

3,4-Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) is consumed worldwide, despite its potential to cause toxicity in several organs and even death. There is a recognized need to clarify the biological pathways in which MDPV elicits general and target-organ toxicity. In this work, a comprehensive untargeted GC-MS-based metabolomics analysis was performed, aiming...

Given the high biological impact of classical and emerging toxicants, a sensitive and comprehensive assessment of the hazards and risks of these substances to organisms is urgently needed. In this sense, toxicometabolomics emerged as a new and growing field in life sciences, which use metabolomics to provide new sets of susceptibility, exposure, an...

Ciprofloxacin (CPX), the most commonly used fluoroquinolone antibiotic, and microplastics (MPs) are two classes of emerging contaminants with severe adverse impacts on aquatic organisms. Previous studies suggest that both CPX and MPs induce deleterious changes on exposed aquatic biota, but the characterization of a chronic and combined ecotoxicolog...

Food remains a major source of human exposure to chemical contaminants that are unintentionally present in commodities globally, despite strict regulation. Scientific literature is a valuable source of quantification data on those contaminants in various foods, but manually summarizing the information is not practicable. In this review, literature...

Background Accurate assessments of current and future fertility-including overall trends and changing population age structures across countries and regions-are essential to help plan for the profound social, economic, environmental, and geopolitical challenges that these changes will bring. Estimates and projections of fertility are necessary to i...

Background Accurate assessments of current and future fertility-including overall trends and changing population age structures across countries and regions-are essential to help plan for the profound social, economic, environmental, and geopolitical challenges that these changes will bring. Estimates and projections of fertility are necessary to i...

Background Estimates of demographic metrics are crucial to assess levels and trends of population health outcomes. The profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on populations worldwide has underscored the need for timely estimates to understand this unprecedented event within the context of long-term population health trends. The Global Burden of D...

Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) is an old drug used for psoriasis treatment that has recently been repurposed to treat relapse–remitting multiple sclerosis, mostly due to its neuro- and immunomodulatory actions. However, mining of a pharmacovigilance database recently ranked DMF as the second pharmaceutical most associated with cognitive adverse events. To...

Long-term cognitive dysfunction, or “chemobrain”, has been observed in cancer patients treated with chemotherapy. Mitoxantrone (MTX) is a topoisomerase II inhibitor that binds and intercalates with DNA, being used in the treatment of several cancers and multiple sclerosis. Although MTX can induce chemobrain, its neurotoxic mechanisms are poorly stu...

Dear Colleagues, Emerging technologies in mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) have created a new avenue of opportunity to address current gaps and challenges in the toxicity assessment of chemicals/particles with potential impact on human and environmental health. Metabolomics has proven to be a powerful tool f...

Cyclophosphamide is a widely used anticancer and immunosuppressive prodrug that unfortunately causes severe adverse effects, including cardiotoxicity. Although the exact cardiotoxic mechanisms are not completely understood, a link between cyclophosphamide’s pharmacologically active metabolites, namely 4-hydroxycyclophosphamide and acrolein, and the...

INTRODUCTION Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC) constitutes approximately 90–95% of all kidney neoplasms and is the second most lethal urological cancer. Current diagnostic techniques rely on imaging techniques and an invasive procedure (biopsy) is always required for histopathologic confirmation of malignancy. For these reasons, the identification of acc...

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are highly attractive for biomedical applications. Therefore, several in vitro and in vivo studies have addressed their safety evaluation. Nevertheless, there is a lack of knowledge regarding their potential detrimental effect on human kidney. To evaluate this effect, AuNPs with different sizes (13 nm and 60 nm), shapes (...

Synthetic cathinones abuse remains a serious public health problem. Kidney injury has been reported in intoxications associated with synthetic cathinones, but the molecular mechanisms involved have not been explored yet. In this study, the potential in vitro nephrotoxic effects of four commonly abused cathinone derivatives, namely pentedrone, 3,4-d...

The identification of noninvasive biomarkers able to detect renal cell carcinoma (RCC) at an early stage remains an unmet clinical need. The recognition that altered metabolism is a core hallmark of cancer boosted metabolomic studies focused in the search for cancer biomarkers. The present work aims to evaluate the performance of the volatile metab...

Hyperthermia has been extensively reported as a life-threatening consequence of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ecstasy) abuse. In this work, we used a sensitive untargeted metabolomic approach based on gas chromatography− mass spectrometry to evaluate the impact of hyperthermia on the hepatic metabolic changes caused by MDMA. For this pur...

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are promising nanoplatforms for drug therapy, diagnostic and imaging. However, biological comparison studies for different types of AuNPs fail in consistency due to the lack of sensitive methods to detect subtle differences in the expression of toxicity. Therefore, innovative and sensitive approaches such as metabolomics...

Methylone (3,4-methylenedioxymethcathinone) is one of the most popular new psychoactive drugs worldwide. Although advertised as a safe drug, its use has been associated to several cases of liver damage. In this work, a metabolomics approach based on gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) combined with chemometric analyses was used to characte...

Background and aims: Liver toxicity is a well-documented and potentially fatal adverse complication of hyperthermia. However, the impact of hyperthermia on the hepatic metabolome has hitherto not been investigated. Methods: In this study, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS)-based metabolomics was applied to assess the in vitro metabolic...

Resveratrol is a naturally occurring phytoalexin produced by the Vitis vinifera L. plant. It exists as two isomers (cis and trans), both present in wines. This work describes the development and validation of a GC-MS/MS analytical procedure for their determination in wines, which include five steps for sample preparation: pre-treatment, SPE extract...

The widespread recreational use of synthetic cannabinoids (SCBs) represents a major public health issue, as reports of intoxications and deaths following SCB use rapidly mount up. Specifically, a direct link between SCB use and acute kidney injury (AKI) has been established, although the pathophysiologic mechanisms remain undefined. Here we assesse...

Previous studies have shown that metabolomics can be a useful tool to better understand the mechanisms of carcinogenesis; however, alterations in biochemical pathways that lead to bladder cancer (BC) development have hitherto not been fully investigated. In this study, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS)-based metabolomics was applied to u...

3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ecstasy) is a well-known hepatotoxic drug. Although its toxicity has been thoroughly studied at high concentrations, there is still insufficient knowledge on possible alterations of cell function at subtoxic concentrations, which are in fact more representative concentrations of intoxication scenarios. In th...

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in men in most western countries. Currently, serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) is the most used biomarker for PCa diagnosis in clinical practice. However, this biomarker has limited sensitivity and specificity and does not differentiate aggressive from indolent PCa. These...

Synthetic cathinones, also known as bath salts, emerged in the recreational drug market in the mid-2000s as alternatives to illicit drugs such as amphetamines and cocaine and represent nowadays a large class of new popular drugs of abuse. The use of synthetic cathinones is associated with adverse health effects, including renal injury, although the...

Metabolomics is the comprehensive study of the metabolome, which encompasses the repertoire of low-molecular weight molecules required for the maintenance, growth and normal cellular function.Oneof the major goals of metabolomics is the discovery of specific metabolic alterations associated with a disease or other external stimuli. The aim of the p...

Synthetic cathinones (�-Keto amphetamines; �-KA) abuse has been associated with renal injury. However, the exact mechanism behind the nephrotoxic effects of �-KA is not yet understood. This study aimed to investigate the role of autophagy in �-KAinduced nephrotoxicity in human kidney (HK-2) cells. To this purpose, HK-2 cells were exposed to two dif...

The enantioresolution of pentedrone and methylone was carried out at a multi-milligram scale by liquid chromatography on a Chiralpak AS® stationary phase. The excellent enantioresolution using this column allowed to collect highly pure enantiomeric fractions, achieving enantiomeric ratios higher than 98%. An overall recovery of 72% was achieved for...

Two methods based on headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) coupled to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) were developed to study in vitro the cell volatile exometabolome, which were then further tested in a pilot study to evaluate galactosamine-induced hepatotoxicity. The analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) was carried...

Introduction: Recent studies provide a convincing support that the presence of cancer cells in the body leads to the alteration of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emanating from biological samples, particularly of those closely related with tumoral tissues. Thus, a great interest emerged for the study of cancer volatilome and subsequent attempts...

Serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is currently the most used biomarker in clinical practice for prostate cancer (PCa) detection. However, this biomarker has several drawbacks. In this work, an untargeted gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS)-based metabolomic profiling of PCa cells was performed to prove the concept that metabolic altera...

Prostate cancer (PCa) is an important health problem worldwide. Diagnosis and management of PCa is very complex because the detection of serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) has several drawbacks. Metabolomics brings promise for cancer biomarker discovery and for better understanding PCa biochemistry. In this study, a gas chromatography-mass spect...

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a major safety issue during drug development, as well as the most common cause for the withdrawal of drugs from the pharmaceutical market. The identification of DILI biomarkers is a labor-intensive area. Conventional biomarkers are not specific and often only appear at significant levels when liver damage is subs...

Economically important forest species as Eucalyptus globulus face risks associated with climate changes, whose immediate and long term damages are yet to account. The aim of this study was to decipher the impacts of UV-B radiation on the physiological performance and metabolome profile of leaves of Eucalyptus juvenile plants. For that, three month...

Synthetic cathinones have emerged in recreational drug markets as legal alternatives for classical amphetamines. Though currently banned in several countries, 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) is one of the most commonly abused cathinone derivatives worldwide. We have recently reported the potential of MDPV to induce hepatocellular damage, but...

The use of cathinone designer drugs in recreational settings has been associated with severe toxic effects, including liver damage. The precise mechanisms by which cathinones induce hepatotoxicity and whether they act by common pathways remains to be elucidated. Herein, we assessed the toxicity of the cathinones methylone, pentedrone, 3,4-methylene...

Oral presentation

Kratom is a popular ‘legal high’ mainly constituted by alkaloids extracted from the Mitragyna speciosa plant with mitragynine (MG) as the dominant active substance. The increasing use of Kratom for recreational purposes has alerted risk assessment bodies of the lack of information on the real composition and its potential health risks. The present...

In the area of psychotropic drugs, tryptamines are known to be a broad class of classical or serotonergic hallucinogens. These drugs are capable of producing profound changes in sensory perception, mood and thought in humans and act primarily as agonists of the 5-HT2A receptor. Well-known tryptamines such as psilocybin contained in Aztec sacred mus...

Synthetic cathinones recently emerged in the recreational drug markets as legal alternatives (‘legal highs’) to illicit stimulants. Although their use is often thought to be harmless, the use of cathinone derivatives has been associated with several cases of toxicity and deaths, with clinical patterns similar to amphetamines. The aim of this study...

In our study we investigated the plasma level/activity of antiox-idant parameters in women according to their HER2 status. 76 BC patients were subdivided into 59 HER− (negative for HER2 overex-pression) and 17 HER2+ (positive for HER2 overexpression). There were determined plasma level of selenium (Se), vitamin A and E (vitA, vitE), ␤-carotene, TBA...

The world's status quo on recreational drugs has dramatically changed in recent years due to the rapid emergence of new psychoactive substances (NPS), represented by new narcotic or psychotropic drugs, in pure form or in preparation, which are not controlled by international conventions, but that may pose a public health threat comparable with that...