Read-across approaches, which are currently absent for NMs, in large part as a result of data fragmentation and inaccessibility, would reduce the cost of nanosafety research and regulation dramatically by removing the need for extensive laboratory and animal testing.
The availability of a nanosafety knowledge infrastructure, that organises and visualises data and data relationships, makes it accessible, integrates computational tools for risk assessment and decision support, enables their validation and facilitates the necessary grouping will be a critical factor in reducing regulatory costs.
The H2020 Infrastructures project, NanoCommons, addresses this gap by creating a community framework and infrastructure for reproducible science, and in particular for in silico workflows for nanomaterials safety assessment and beyond, by:
- integration and federation of existing NMs characterisation and interaction mechanisms knowledge, protocols and data (beyond simple toxicity), along with quality assurance criteria and underpinning ontologies
- compilation and development of a user-friendly interface for a suite of computational tools for mechanistic and statistical modelling, read-across, grouping, safe-by-design and life cycle assessment, and bench-marking of their predictive power; and
- provision of (typically remote) access to its KnowledgeBase, modelling toolbox (predictive, grouping, risk assessment) and workflow optimisation, and the supporting expertise, to the broader user community.
