Join us to celebrate a special milestone for our new professors and hear about their inspiring career journeys. Doors for this event will open at 16.45, with the lectures to commence at 17.00. A drinks reception will be held immediately after the lecture at 17:30.

Professor Michael Antoniou

Glyphosate herbicides: safer than table salt or deceptively toxic?

Abstract

Glyphosate herbicides, such as Monsanto’s (now Bayer) Roundup, are the most widely used weedkillers in the world. Monsanto and other pesticide advocates have claimed that glyphosate is safe even at high levels of ingestion and that it is safer than table salt. However, scientific evidence shows that glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) can have many toxic effects, including DNA damage, neurotoxicity, cancer, and birth defects. Using cutting-edge molecular profiling methods, my group has shown that exposure to realistic levels of GBHs can cause gut microbiome dysfunction, compromised gut integrity, and fatty liver disease – a modern epidemic. We have also shown that commonly used pesticide mixtures including glyphosate are more toxic than single pesticides. Overall, our work shows that the daily intake levels of glyphosate permitted by regulators need to be drastically lowered to better protect public health.

Biography

Michael Antoniou was born in Famagusta, Cyprus in 1955 and emigrated to England with his family in 1959. He graduated in biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 1977 and obtained a PhD in the molecular biology of milk fat synthesis from the University of Reading in 1981. After spending three years (1980-1983) as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Nebraska, USA, Michael obtained a position as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research (Mill Hill, London) from 1984-1994 as a member of the Gene Structure and Expression group. He then joined the United Medical and Dental Schools (UMDS) of Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals in 1994, establishing his own research programme as part of the Experimental Pathology group.

Michael has been based on the Guy’s Hospital site ever since, including following the assimilation of UMDS into KCL in 1998, when he became a member of the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics. Historically, Michael is a molecular biologist, having made seminal contributions to the field, including biotechnology applications in gene therapy and protein therapeutic biomanufacture. In 2013, he expanded his research into the area of molecular toxicology, specialising in using multiomics (molecular composition profiling) methods to more sensitively measure outcomes from exposure to chemical pollutants (pesticides and endocrine disruptive plasticisers), including effects on the gut microbiome. Since then, Prof Antoniou’s group has become a world leader in glyphosate herbicide toxicology.