Assessing NIAS Risk When Toxicological Data Are Limited

LCGC International spoke to Marinella Vitulli—founder of Food Contact Center and Food Contact Services—about her work and her presentation at the recent ASMS conference titled, "Untargeted HRMS Screening of Emerging Contaminants in Food Contact Materials: PFAS, Bisphenols, and NIAS.”¹ The talk detailed a suspect and non-target HRMS screening workflow built around proprietary spectral libraries for food contact material (FCM) safety assessment.

In this interview clip, Vitulli discusses:

• Given that your untargeted workflow detects compounds well beyond regulated lists, how do you approach risk communication when you find NIAS with no toxicological data available?

Rather than treating every NIAS detection as equally concerning in the absence of toxicological data, she describes her lab's first move as assessing realistic consumer exposure. That means checking food consumption data² — she references EFSA figures for intake across different countries — against the specific packaging application in question. A salt container or a small yogurt pot, she notes, involves such limited daily consumption that low-level, data-poor findings often don't warrant extensive follow-up or alarm. Packaging associated with high-volume staples, such as pizza cartons or pasta packaging, sits at the opposite end of that spectrum and is treated with far more caution, since consumers may be exposed to much larger cumulative quantities of an uncharacterized substance.

When a finding falls into that higher-concern category, Vitulli describes escalating the investigation rather than reporting on limited data alone: examining fragmentation data more closely, and when spectral databases don't provide a confident structural match, turning to complementary techniques, including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analysis and offline chromatographic separation to isolate a compound for further characterization outside the instrument itself.

References

1. Vitulli, M. Cozzolino, F.; Pratesi, F. Untargeted HRMS Screening of Emerging Contaminants in Food Contact Materials: PFAS, Bisphenols, and NIAS. Presented at ASMS 2026, in San Diego, California, USA. https://asms.org/docs/default-source/conference/74th-asms-final-program_as-of-may-8-2026.pdf?sfvrsn=1234fc3_0 (accessed 2026-08-06).
2. European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The EFSA Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database.