Cefic-lri Programme | European Chemical Industry Council

HBM Simulator – Human Biomonitoring Simulator

In many large-scale human biomonitoring (HBM) surveys, single samples of blood, urine or other bodily matrices are collected from individuals recruited from the general population. When a single sample is collected however, it is very difficult to understand whether this biomarker measurement is truly representative for an individual’s long term average exposure, or whether it may be due to a recent peak exposure. This may lead to misclassification of individuals with high/low exposures and is of particular concern if the exposure pattern is discontinuous and the compounds have a short half-life in the biological matrix.

HBM Simulator is an easy-to-use software model that has been developed by Cefic LRI in collaboration with VITO, the Health & Safety Laboratory and the Summit Toxicology as part of the HBM4 project “Understanding inter- and intra-individual variability in human biomonitoring spot samples”.

HBM Simulator was developed to allow researchers and regulators to quickly investigate the representativeness of spot biomonitoring samples in relation to different exposure patterns, chemical-related properties including half-life, and estimate how this is affected by e.g. creatinine correction or multiple sampling strategies. This tool also provides reverse dosimetry calculations that estimate an individual’s likely exposure given their measured biomarker concentration.

Access

The software model is publicly available and free to download here.

Read here the instructions for download and installation. In order for the software model to function, MATLAB Component Runtime 7.14 needs to be installed, which is included in the installation package.

References

For more information about the HBM Simulator and its applications read the Executive Summary of the HBM4 project.

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