The capacity to assess the safety of novel engineered nanomaterials (NM), matching the rate of their development and introduction to the market, is the defining factor for the progress of nanotechnology. It can be significantly increased using modern methods in biology, materials and data science to identify the mechanisms of action of the NM. SmartNanoTox project used in vivo, in vitro and in silico methods to infer the main respiratory adverse outcome pathways (AOP) induced by exposure to NMs, to relate them to interactions at the bionano interface and to NM's properties. Knowledge of the properties of concern enables the safer-by-design approaches in industry as it allow one to reduce or avoid the undesirable characteristics at the stage of nano-enabled product development. The detailed information about AOPs can be used to perform toxicity screening without animal experimentation.
SmartNanoTox objectives:
• To identify main pulmonary AOs induced by NMs and associated molecular initiating events (MIE), biological key events (KE) and toxicity pathways (TP) leading to the AOs
• To establish relationships between physicochemical properties of NMs and the KEs, and suggest descriptors for grouping of NMs according to their toxicological mode of action
• To create a database of bionano interactions that will enable development of read-across and QSAR tools for the toxicity assessment of new NMs
• To develop a smart screening approach, where predictions of toxicity of a NM can be made on the basis of purely computational or limited in vitro screening tests focused on crucial bionano interactions
SmartNanoTox team has successfully completed the planned research programme and met its main goals. The team demonstrated the possibility to make predictions of chronic AOs based on in vitro and in silico tests only, described several AOPs, developed methods of advanced NM characterisation, created a database of bionano interactions, and proposed suits of smart tests based on the mechanistic picture of the toxicity.
