Reliability of methods and data for regulatory assessment of nanomaterial risks

- Impressing number of methods and tools in the literature is appropriate for regulatory risk assessment of nanomaterials.
- Core areas of future regulatory research identified
- Concrete proposals for further work of institutions like OECD and ECHA presented

Within the EU funded project Prosafe a review on the regulatory relevance of the results of several EU and US funded nanosafety research projects was conducted. The objective was to identify those methods, data and protocols that are appropriate for regulatory risk assessment of manufactured nanomaterials. A task force with nine experienced experts was established which examined approximately 1000 publications. They looked at reliability and regulatory relevance as the main criteria to identify which research products are most useful to regulators. The results of this review are published in this Special Issue. This article summarizes the main recommendations, identifies the most relevant knowledge gaps and draws some general conclusions. The review demonstrates that a number of new tools to enable regulatory risk assessment of nanomaterials are now available or near completion.