Substances ingested or inhaled by a pregnant mother can harm a developing foetus, often with lifelong effects. Air pollution by ultrafine particles generated in the environment, often as by-products of fossil fuel combustion, as well as by micro-nanoplastics is a growing public health concern. These particles, due to their small size, they can reach the deepest lung regions, cross into the bloodstream and be distributed throughout the body. The EU-funded UPRISE project aims to better understand this threat. The team will create exposure databases and develop assessment models. The consortium will also study pregnant women exposed to these pollutants and investigate adverse outcome at delivery via transcriptomic, epigenetic or mitochondrial mutation analysis. Children will also be followed during the first year of life.

The UPRISE project aims to unravel the complex mechanisms by which air pollution, in particular ultrafine particles (UFPs) and micro-nanoplastics (MNPs), disrupt normal fetal development leading to an increased risk of adverse birth outcomes (ABOs), including preterm birth, increasing the risk of premature children to develop a range of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in adulthood. UPRISE will develop exposure databases and assessment models for these emerging pollutants in different exposure scenarios to improve our understanding of their sources, concentrations and dispersion patterns. UPRISE will include a clinical study with pregnant participants exposed to different levels of UFPs and MNPs pollution to analyse possible modes of action leading to ABO based on transcriptomic, epigenetic or mitochondrial mutation analysis and subsequently identify possible key events, including molecular initiating events. As a result, causal models supported by weight-of-evidence analysis will be developed to demonstrate the link between contaminant uptake and events triggering the ABO of interest. To facilitate the dissemination of results and their application in policy-making, UPRISE will develop user-friendly tools for reporting and sharing data, with the aim of facilitating the integration of scientific evidence into the updating of European and national air quality standards. By advancing in the quantification of the public health impact of prenatal air pollution exposure and providing guidelines and decision support tools for policy makers, the project will contribute to reducing the burden of NCDs associated with preterm birth and other ABOs.