Johan Lundqvist

Johan Lundqvist earned his Master of Science in Pharmacy from Uppsala University in 2005 and completed his PhD in Pharmaceutical Biochemistry there in 2011. Following postdoctoral research at the Danish Cancer Society Research Center and a visiting fellowship at Stanford University, he joined the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in 2013. He became Associate Professor of Molecular Toxicology in 2018 and was awarded SLU’s Silver Medal for Distinguished Service in 2021 for developing innovative methods to detect hazardous substances in drinking water.

In 2024, he was appointed Professor of Toxicology with a focus on food and drinking water safety.

Canary in the Coal Mine 2.0 – A New Early Warning System for Hazardous Chemicals

Hundreds of thousands of chemical substances exist in our environment, ranging from naturally occurring algal toxins to synthetic industrial chemicals and pharmaceutical residues. Traditionally, chemical safety assessment has focused on evaluating one substance at a time. By determining the toxicity of individual chemicals, researchers can estimate exposure levels considered safe for humans and the environment. However, this strategy has significant limitations.

The first — and perhaps greatest — challenge is that we often do not know what we are looking for. Well-known pollutants account for only a small fraction of the toxicity that can be detected in, for example, water samples. Moreover, neither humans nor ecosystems are exposed to single chemicals in isolation. In reality, we are continuously exposed to complex and ever-changing mixtures of thousands of substances. Measuring chemicals individually reveals little about the combined toxicity of the full mixture, since chemicals can interact through so-called “cocktail effects.” Another challenge is the sheer number of chemicals in the environment — it is simply impossible to measure hundreds of thousands of substances simultaneously. Focusing only on known contaminants is like seeing only the tip of an iceberg, while unknown pollutants and mixture effects remain hidden beneath the surface.

These challenges have led me, and many other researchers worldwide, to conclude that we need new approaches for assessing the safety of the water we drink and the food we eat. Instead of studying chemicals one by one, we need analytical methods capable of evaluating entire complex mixtures at once and answering a simple but critical question: Is there anything harmful in this sample?

The major advantage of such methods is their ability to detect toxicity caused not only by known chemicals, but also by unknown contaminants and by mixture effects arising when multiple chemicals interact. In other words, these methods allow us to see the entire iceberg of contamination — both the well-known pollutants at the surface and the hidden threats below.

My research focuses on developing these next-generation analytical methods and demonstrating how they can contribute to safer food and drinking water. The methods are based on cultured cells from humans and other animals, which we engineer to function as sensitive biosensors capable of detecting different types of contaminants in the samples we analyze.

During the first half of the twentieth century, canaries were used in coal mines as early warning systems that saved countless miners from toxic gases. The next generation of early warning systems designed to protect us from hazardous chemicals has neither feathers nor wings — but if you ask me, they grow in the cell culture incubators of our laboratories.

The analytical tools developed in my research have the potential to become precisely such an early warning system: rapidly alerting us when hazardous substances are present within the iceberg of contamination hidden in our food and drinking water.

Simply put: a canary in the coal mine — version 2.0.