Non conventional biological treatment based on Trametes versicolor for the elimination of recalcitrant anticancer drugs in hospital wastewater Laura Ferrando-Climent a,1 , Carles Cruz-Morató b,1 , Ernest Marco-Urrea b , Teresa Vicent b , Montserrat Sarrà b , Sara Rodriguez-Mozaz a,⇑ , Damià Barceló a,c a Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA), H2O Building, Scientific and Technological Park of the University of Girona, 101-E-17003 Girona, Spain b Departament d’Enginyeria Química, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), 08193 Bellaterra, Spain c Water and Soil Quality Research Group, Department of Environmental Chemistry, IDAEA-CSIC, Jordi Girona 18-26, 08034 Barcelona, Spain highlights  Removals from 48 till 100% of anticancer drugs in hospital effluent treated by fungi.  Cyclophosphamide and Ifosfamide remained unalterable whereas Tamoxifen was totally removed.  Two hydroxilated positional isomers of Tamoxifen detected for first time in treated effluents. article info Article history: Received 8 December 2014 Received in revised form 16 March 2015 Accepted 24 March 2015 Handling Editor: Jörg E. Drewes Keywords: Cytotoxic Anticancer drugs Hospital effluent Removal Trametes versicolor HRMS abstract This work presents a study about the elimination of anticancer drugs, a group of pollutants considered recalcitrant during conventional activated sludge wastewater treatment, using a biological treatment based on the fungus Trametes versicolor. A 10-L fluidized bed bioreactor inoculated with this fungus was set up in order to evaluate the removal of 10 selected anticancer drugs in real hospital wastewater. Almost all the tested anticancer drugs were completely removed from the wastewater at the end of the batch experiment (8 days) with the exception of Ifosfamide and Tamoxifen. These two recalcitrant com- pounds, together with Cyclophosphamide, were selected for further studies to test their degradability by T. versicolor under optimal growth conditions. Cyclophosphamide and Ifosfamide were inalterable during batch experiments both at high and low concentration, whereas Tamoxifen exhibited a decrease in its concentration along the treatment. Two positional isomers of a hydroxylated form of Tamoxifen were identified during this experiment using a high resolution mass spectrometry based on ultra-high perfor- mance chromatography coupled to an Orbitrap detector (LTQ-Velos Orbitrap). Finally the identified transformation products of Tamoxifen were monitored in the bioreactor run with real hospital wastewater. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Cancer is ranked (year 2012) in the second place (21%) of non-communicable diseases (this means non-infectious and non-transmissible medical conditions) which are causing deaths, after cardiovascular illness (48%) and followed by respiratory dis- eases (12%) (www.who.int); for that reason the high consumption of the drugs for chemotherapy treatments has became a cause of concern. These specific drugs have been shown to have potent cytotoxic, genotoxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, endocrine disruptor and/or teratogenic effects in several organisms, since they have been designed to disrupt or prevent cellular proliferation, usually by interfering in DNA synthesis or disrupting the endocrine sys- tem. The occurrences of these drugs in the aquatic environment could be especially critical since they are intrinsically hazardous. Several ecotoxicological studies have shown that in some cases such as for the cancer drug 5-Fluorouracil, the lowest observed- effect concentration values (in algal and bacterial assays) were close to the concentration found in sewage effluents (Zounkova et al., 2007). More recently, studies have revealed that mixtures of anticancer drugs in real samples possess an important tox- icological effect comparing with the individual drug (Mater et al., 2014). In general these so-called anticancer drugs can be released to the aquatic environment via hospital or domestic wastewater http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2015.03.051 0045-6535/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. 1 Laura Ferrando-Climent and Carles Cruz-Morató contributed equally to this work. Chemosphere 136 (2015) 9–19 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Chemosphere journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/chemosphere