Nanomaterial Screening helps determine which particles are toxic

Nanomaterial Screening Determines Which Particles Are Toxic

Due to the concern about the toxicity of some nanomaterials scientists have developed a screening process that will help determine which materials are harmful. There are many nanoscale materials already in the marketplace today and there are many more on the way. However, information on these materials is extremely limited and this has policy makers as well as the scientific community worried about the effects these nanomaterials may have on public health.

Testing the toxicity of nanomaterials is very complicated because each one may vary in their size, shape and chemical make-up. In addition, each cell in the body may react differently when exposed to these materials so doing short run testing may not give reliable results. In addition, using animals in these studies is not always practical or efficient and can produce results that differ from the results in the human cell studies.

"Nanomaterials are really complex, and if you just carry out one or two tests, you're going to miss something,"says Andrew Maynard, chief science advisor to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, DC.

To counter these complexities scientists have developed a large scale screening process similar to those used in cancer drug trials. Stanley Shaw, a chemical biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Systems Biology, and his colleagues at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT designed a testing system for large numbers of nanomaterials. The system used four varieties of cells, four levels of dosages and 50 different types of nanoparticals.

"We're trying to get a sense of what these materials do in a broader variety of contexts," says Shaw. "It makes you less dependent on the idiosyncrasies of a particular cell type." The study showed various groups of nanoparticles had the same effect on cells as well as having the same response in cells from mice.

This screening tool may prove to be invaluable for those developing new nanoproducts and may help those products to be safer. However, those developments involving airborne nanoparticles will need further study to determine their safety.

"We need a lot more of these kinds of well-designed and carefully thought-through studies," says John Balbus, chief health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, based in New York. "I'm optimistic that once these [high-throughput] studies start accumulating, we will gain a real understanding of the biological effects of nanomaterials."

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