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October 5, 2017

JRC Publishes NANoREG Toolbox for the Safety Assessment of Nanomaterials

Lynn L. BergesonCarla N. Hutton

The European Commission (EC) Joint Research Center (JRC) has published the NANoREG Toolbox for the Safety Assessment of Nanomaterials.  As reported in our May 8, 2017, blog item, JRC previously published a Science for Policy report entitled NANoREG framework for the safety assessment of nanomaterials.  The report was developed within the NANoREG project, “A common European approach to the regulatory testing of nanomaterials.”  The NANoREG framework represents the project’s proposal for a common understanding in the field of environmental health and safety assessment of nanomaterials under the current European regulatory framework, with focus on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation.  The Toolbox supports the implementation of the framework by providing an overview of available tools (test methods, datasets, models, guidance documents, and decision trees) useful to regulators and other stakeholders in the European REACH context.  The tools consist not only of those released in the scientific deliverables of NANoREG, but include those from other initiatives, at the European level and beyond, that have addressed one or more “nano-specific hurdles” in safety assessment.  The Toolbox distinguishes between current (presently available and accessible) tools and prospective (promised) ones.  The resulting two Excel® workbooks, zipped into a single file, contain a wide review of categorized tools, with descriptive information and metadata attached to them.  The dataset “is freely available to the global nanoEHS community, be it regulators or industry, for further expansion and exploitation.”