A cross-disciplinary team led by Vaia Lida Chatzi, M.D., Ph.D., is working to study how PFAS exposure contributes to liver disease and to reduce the chemicals’ harmful effects. PFAS, which is an abbreviation for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of chemicals known to accumulate in the liver, which is the largest organ in the human body and is responsible for removing chemicals from the blood.

The team will establish the Southern California Superfund Research and Training Program for PFAS Assessment, Remediation, and Prevention (ShARP) Center with the help of a recently awarded grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Funded by the NIEHS Superfund Research Program (SRP), ShARP joins more than 100 university collaborations in SRP Centers nationwide aimed at providing practical, scientific solutions to protect health, the environment, and communities. It is the first SRP center focused specifically on the role of PFAS in human liver disease.

Environmental Factor recently spoke with Chatzi, a professor of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine and director of the ShARP Center. Chatzi discussed PFAS contamination in drinking water, the rise in liver disease among children and adolescents, and the Center’s plans to develop real-world solutions to protect communities.

Environmental Factor (EF): Why is this new center needed now?

Chatzi: We are dealing with a public health crisis. PFAS contaminate more than 200 million Americans’ drinking water and at least 180 Superfund sites.

Human biomonitoring studies show that almost everyone in the U.S. has detectable PFAS levels in their blood. Yet, we don’t really know how PFAS exposure relates to human liver disease. PFAS pollutes the water cycle, particularly wastewater and groundwater. This is a growing but poorly understood threat to public health and water security.

PFAS affect human health, ecosystems, and infrastructure. No single discipline can fully address the biological, chemical, environmental, engineering, and social dimensions of this challenge. Our interdisciplinary collaboration ensures that scientific discoveries do not happen in silos but instead lead to practical solutions, like improvement of water treatment technologies and public health guidance.

EF: What are the center’s short-term and long-term goals?

Chatzi: In the short term, we want to understand how PFAS affect the liver by combining advanced experimental models with real-world data. Our engineering team is characterizing PFAS at several water reclamation facilities. We are also working with local communities to raise awareness about the study results and build trust through transparent communication.

Long term, we want to develop sustainable, cost-effective PFAS remediation technologies and provide the knowledge needed for decision making to reduce PFAS exposure.

EF: What kind of scientific approaches are you using to achieve these goals?

Chatzi: One of our main tools is 3D spheroid modeling, an emerging research technology that enables the study of complex diseases, like liver disease. This model includes multiple types of human liver cells arranged in a three-dimensional structure that closely mimics the architecture of the human liver and how it functions in the body. We can use this 3D environment to investigate how pollutants like PFAS contribute to the development of liver disease and test whether these effects are reversible.

Our team will also conduct a population study to examine the link between PFAS exposure and liver disease in youth, a group that faces an outsized and growing risk of the condition. Currently, there are no effective intervention strategies to tackle the liver disease epidemic affecting children and adolescents. We will investigate what factors and mechanisms may be driving the increase in liver disease and identify critical approaches to address this public health epidemic.

And we have environmental engineers who will explore innovative ways to remove PFAS from polluted water, including through the use of special microbes, chemicals, and ultraviolet methods that can break down the chemicals. The idea is not to move PFAS from one medium to another, which happens with the existing methods. The goal is to destroy PFAS, so that we leave no hazardous PFAS in the waste after the removal.

EF: What steps will be taken to learn how PFAS together with other environmental exposures affect health?

Chatzi: Exposomics is a fantastic framework through which we can examine the full range of environmental exposures across the course of life. In addition to collaborating with other SRP centers, we are partnering with NIH interdisciplinary centers that focus on exposomics research and NIH-funded exposomics initiatives like NEXUS and the Exact Consortium. These collaborations allow us to compare data across different communities.

EF: What will success look like to you?

Chatzi: We want to protect communities from the harmful effects of PFAS by turning science into real-world solutions. Our vision is to build a new model for precision environmental health. Our center uses sophisticated statistical and machine learning models to analyze very complex datasets across biological, environmental, medical, and social domains. This will help us identify who is most at risk to guide personalized prevention and shape policies to safeguard public health.