Dr. Eric Verdon
Wiley Award Address: “A Career Dedicated to Advances in the Control of Veterinary Drug Residues in Food with the Support of New Trends in High Standard Physico-Chemistry Technologies and Expanding a Worldwide Network of Scientific Collaborations”
This year’s Wiley Award winner Eric Verdon is a French chemist who has devoted much of his career to developing and validating ever-better methods for screening for veterinary drug residues and related substances in everything from meat to eggs, honey, urine, animal feed, and shellfish. His address, “A Career Dedicated to Advances in the Control of Veterinary Drug Residues in Food with the Support of New Trends in High Standard Physico-Chemistry Technologies and Expanding a Worldwide Network of Scientific Collaborations,” will be delivered on August 25, 2025, during the 139th AOAC Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, USA.
Over the past three decades, Verdon has spent his career, dedicated to food safety, in a French public service agency. He is Head of the French Agency for Food, Environmental, and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) and also heads up the National and European Union Reference Laboratory (EU-RL) for Veterinary Medicinal Products and Dyes Residues in Food from Animal Origin.
Verdon has been involved in some significant developments to analyze chemical contaminants and, in particular, veterinary drug residues in foods from animal origin. To address the ever-increasing needs in food standard quality, the AgriFood companies testing laboratories, together with those from the regulatory side, are working to meet these standards.
Promoted in the early 1990s from the Atomic Energy Military Agency to the Food Safety Agency, Verdon formed a kind of “poison squad” like Harvey W. Wiley did more than a century ago. He headed a group of seven newly appointed young analysts to develop enhanced methods to address the latest veterinary drug residue regulations to be enforced within the EU.
Designated by the European Commission in 1993 as one of the brand-new reference laboratories heading the EU network of official laboratories, it took less than 10 years in the early 2000s for ANSES to be in position to disseminate its activities in and outside Europe. Verdon notes that ANSES offers a valuable opportunity to interact with the scientific communities around the world, including AOAC INTERNATIONAL and its activities.
During this period, three major analytical concerns became obvious:
(1) Foster development of chromatographic methods to capture as much as possible the wide scope of regulated residues of authorized veterinary medicines in food, as well as tracking the prohibited substances.
(2) Broaden the chromatographic suite of tools to include new systems in addition to conventional HPLC technologies, for example, micro/nano/capillary LC separation systems and electrochromatography.
(3) Innovate mass spectrometric-related methodologies to increase the scope of classes of veterinary drug residues and to speed up and improve reliability of regulatory control. The combination of technological advances in low- and high-resolution spectrometric systems associated with targeted/non-targeted analysis approaches became a major topic in the 2010s and to this day.
As part of the Wiley Award Address, Verdon will share his perspective on advances in the analysis of veterinary drug residues, including the suite of chromatographic and spectrometric tools, and address five relevant topics:
(1) Search for degradation subproducts after veterinary treatment
(2) “Organic” meat safety challenged by chemical contamination and antibacterial residues
(3) Chemical risks in bee products after unsuitable beekeeping practices
(4) Reliable contamination biomarkers based on metabolomics approaches
(5) Challenges regarding current targeted analysis with nontargeted systems to move food safety control to monitoring consumer exposure
Don’t miss the Wiley Award Address at the 2025 AOAC Annual Meeting in San Diego.
