Food and a primary link to human cancer: Developing techniques to measure a potent carcinogen present in cooked foods

Project start date: 1 October 2002
Project status: Completed
Project type: Food safety
Discipline: Food safety - other
Author/s: Prof Chris Elliott, Queen’s University Belfast
Collaborator/s: Single supplier

Research objective

One of the research recommendations that emerged from the World Health Organisation (WHO)/Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Acrylamide in Food Network was the need to develop simple low-cost method(s) to be used for routine monitoring.

The objective of this research was to design rapid and accurate tests for this carcinogenic compound.

Research report

Title: Unpublished report. See below for peer reviewed article.
Date: 8 September 2008
Summary: Designing rapid and accurate tests for the carcinogenic compound, Acrylamide.
Findings:
Two antibody based tests – ELISA and biosensor immunoassays – were produced and were shown to give rapid, quantitative and reproducible results for large numbers of food samples and across a wide range of food matrices.

In addition, these methods were shown to detect adducted acrylamide in human blood samples. Rapid sample preparation permits the analysis of a greater number of samples per day than would be possible with an equivalent LC/MS-MS system. Both ELISA and biosensor immunoassays for the detection of acrylamide in food were the first of their kind.

Other outputs

Preston, A., Fodey, T., Elliott, C.*.(2008).“Development of a high-throughput enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for the routine detection of the Carcinogen Acylamide in food, via rapid derivation pre analysis”. Analytica Chimica acta 608 (2008) 178-185.

Preston, A*, Fodey, T., Douglas, A., Elliott, C. “Monoclonal antibody development for Acrylamide-adducted human haemoglobin; A biomarker of dietary acrylamide exposure”. Journal of Immunological Methods 341 (2009) 19-29.