Project Details

Our consortium’s overall strategy is to apply a highly multi-disciplinary approach to a focused set of scientific questions. This will result in a detailed and comprehensive assessment of engineered nanoparticle reactivity/toxicity, established on a wide range of nanoparticle properties and biological indicators, so that the new dataset can be extrapolated beyond the available data and applied to other engineered metal nanoparticles not considered in our study.

The overriding objective of NanoReTox is to contribute new knowledge to what will be a global endeavour in addressing the scientific uncertainties related to the health and environmental effects of engineered nanoparticles and to provide a body of new information and a new tool that industry and governments can use to begin to assess the risks of these nanomaterials.  

The specific scientific and technical objectives are:

[1]  To synthesise and fully characterise a set of engineered nanoparticles with a range of physicochemical properties using a variety of methods.

[2] To study the abiotic reactivity (transformations) of the synthesised nanoparticles in simulated environmental and biological media.

[3]  To investigate in vivo uptake of nanoparticles by aquatic species and study mechanisms and paths of internalisation.

[4]   To investigate in vitro uptake and reactivity of nanoparticles and to discover putative mechanisms of toxicity.

[5] To consider the genotoxicity and carcinogenicity of metal nanoparticles.

[6] To determine whether cellular responses between human cells, mammalian cells, cell lines and invertebrate cells or whole organisms are comparable or different with relevance to screening models.

[7] To establish universal approaches to risk assessment model and risk communication.