Lice-off - Developing Post-Treatment Decomposable Drugs for Salmon Lice

Lice-off is the first project looking at the development and testing of a new class of chemicals with a significantly reduced environmental impact. By introducing an active functional group, the chemicals will degrade faster, therefore reducing significantly their impact on the environment Despite a significant reduction in volume in the recent years, chemicals are still in many cases used to prevent and control the spread of lices. There is however significant concerns on the environmental impact of chemicals, especially on other crustaceans such as shrimps, crabs and lobsters. There is a need to reduce the half-life of these compounds in the environment in order to operate more environmentally friendly and sustainable. In this project we generated new chemical compounds that are as active against lices and that will have a significantly reduced half life in the environment after treatment. The new Chemicals developed in the Project will be subjected to a thorough evaluation and testing. The results of this Project are also of interest for other industrial areas such as the pharamaceutical sector since the active compounds can also be incorporated in the structure of other key chemicals such as antibiotics, which has been recently shown to be present in the rivers around the world, sometimes in dangerously high concentrations.

The goal of the project was to generate and test new active chemical compounds with reduced half-life in the environment. The chemicals developed in the project were tested on sea lice to assess their biological activity as pesticide for the aquaculture. Several compounds with good activities will be tested further at lower concentration to verify their potential as pesticide for the aquaculture sector . In parallel, the results and knowledge generated in the project will benefit other industrial areas such as the pharmaceutical sector, especially the development of new antibiotic with reduced risk of bioaccumulation in nature to combat the rising threat of antibiotic microbial resistance.