| Project Detail |
Hazard assessment for advanced nanomaterial innovations
Advanced nanomaterials (Ad-NMs) offer immense benefits to the industrial sector. They could revolutionise the industry if used efficiently. In fact, their use could improve services and speed up the transition to greener technologies throughout most sectors. Unfortunately, the lack of technologies and methods for Ad-NM hazard and risk evaluation has hindered their growth and overall demand. The EU-funded POTENTIAL project aims to change that by developing an efficient methodology for investigating, testing and assessing risks and hazards across Ad-NM innovations. To improve its effectiveness, the project will collaborate with current Horizon initiatives, European partners and standardisation organisations.
Advanced Nanomaterials (Ad-NMs) will lead a new industrial revolution and accelerate the transition to greener technologies and better health care. However, lack of practical and reliable protocols to evaluate Ad-NMs potential hazards and risks has hindered innovation so far.
POTENTIAL will generate a methodological framework comprising a set of harmonised protocols for characterisation, testing, grouping and read-across of Ad-NMs, that meet regulatory requirements for risk assessment, by improving:
a) Advanced imaging protocols to quantify and characterize the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of Ad-NMs in complex matrices, using conventional analytical methods.
b) Protocols to trace the evolution of Ad-NMs properties throughout their lifecycle, and methodologies for accelerated testing.
c) in vitro multi-cellular models, in vivo (invertebrate) models, and ecotoxicological models for assessing the environmental and health hazard of Ad-NMs.
Grouping and read-across approaches will build up on results from existing Horizon initiatives (GRACIOUS, SUNSHINE and HARMLESS), and will generate novel algorithms for similarity assessment, grouping hypotheses and Integrated Approaches to Testing and Assessments (IATAs).
The protocols generated in the project will be validated through peer-reviewed publications and disseminated in Open Access. Furthermore, we will engage with the relevant standardisation bodies and organisations (OECD, ISO, CEN) to ensure that our approach can be translated into industry standards.
The consortium comprises 11 European partners and 1 international partner (China), among which 4 high-tech SMEs specialised in Ad-NMs, and a high-tech incubator / accelerator. POTENTIAL contributes to the Horizon Europe workprogram by helping establish appropriate methods for cost-efficient assessment and prediction of the health and environmental effects of Ad-NMs, as well as supporting the inclusion of new methods to support safe-and-sustainable-by-design. |
