HARMLESS @ nanoSAFE2023

Last week, from 5^th to 9^th June, the joint conference of nanoSAFE 2023 and NanoSafety Cluster took place in Grenoble (France). This eighth edition of the international conference on health and safety issues for the socially responsible use of nanomaterials, organized by CEA, brought together international experts on various topics with the main objective of sharing the latest research results on health, safety and also sustainability issues related to nanomaterials and beyond.

The whole week was full of very interesting presentations on the different conference topics:

• Methods, tools and technologies for SSbD purposes.
• Implementation of the SSbD concept in case studies
• Transferability and acceptance of the concept of SSbD
• Commonalities of the SSbD paradigm in innovation
• From nanomaterial risk assessment to risk governance, a journey through regulation and standardization
• Characterization of advanced materials, including nanomaterials
• Modeling, nanosafety digitization, and data management
• Pollution from micro- and nanoplastics
• NanoTech Talks: advancements in the nanotechnology industry.

The event was attended by approximately 250 people from various organizations in the nanosafety community (academia, industry, and regulatory agencies) around the globe.

Special thanks to the speakers of the plenary talks: Monique Groenewold (RIVM) with her presentation on future-proof approaches to risk governance and lessons learned from nanotechnologies, Georgios Katalagarianakis (retired European Commission Commissioner) who provided insights and recommendations for the transition from regulation to SbD to SSbD, Hubert Rauscher (EC-JRC) who explained the European Commission’s SSbD framework for chemicals and materials, Lars Montelius (Lund University), co-author of the AMI 2030 initiative, explained how the initiative aims to pave the way for a unified European systemic change for people, planet and prosperity, and Elisabeth Heunisch (BAuA) spoke about the OECD Test Guidelines (TG) for nanomaterials, their progress and future support for TG development through the Malta Initiative and the NanoHarmony project.

On Tuesday, 6^th June, the EU NSC General Assembly took place in the afternoon. Apart from catching up on the activities of the last months and getting an insight into future plans, we inaugurated the new member of the NSC Coordination Team (Monique Groenewold, RIVM) and said goodbye to Flemming Cassee, whom we thanked for his great work in the last years as important part of the coordination team. In addition, the community was also informed of some changes in the NSC Communications Team: The entire team expressed their sincere thanks to Lesley Tobin and Tassos Papadiamantis for their great work in the past, and the BNN team was recognized in their new roles. To be part of the NSC community and keep up with the latest news, events and developments, please subscribe to our regular NSC Update.

On Wednesday, 7^th June, the SSbD Solutions Day took place, where the different S(S)bD projects (SABYDOMA, SAbyNA, ASINA, SbD4Nano, DIAGONAL, HARMLESS, SUNSHINE, IRISS, PARC, etc.) presented their approaches and results. Two panel discussions were also organized with representative experts on the industrial perspective of SSbD and on collaboration and alignment on SSbD.

Other activities of the conference worth highlighting were:

• The 2nd SABYDOMA workshop on “Legal aspects of SSbD”
• The NSC Education, Training and Communication Working Group, chaired by Martin Himly (PLUS), organized several training sessions on the following topics as part of its main task of networking ongoing projects around nanomaterials, advanced materials, nanomedicine and microplastics:
  • FAIR data, by Nina Jeliazkova (IdeaConsult).
  • FAIR Data & Model provision, by Thomas Exner (Seven past Nine) and Martin Himly (Paris Lodron University Salzburg).
  • New methods on the way to regulatory acceptance, by colleagues from the NanoHarmony project.
  • Stakeholder perspective on SSbD, by Claire Mays.

All in all, it was a great event with many interesting talks, networking and social activities. We would like to thank the CEA for hosting the event and for the excellent organization and smooth running of the event.

The conference program can be viewed here. Videos and more pictures of the event are available here.

In addition to the overall networking activity, HARMLESS project was among the many projects represented through:

• 1 poster presentation:

• • Gergana Tancheva (IDEA), on automatic workflow for HTS data FAIRification, preprocessing and Tox5 in-vitro toxicity scoring – DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8029959

• 2 oral presentations:
  • Lianyong Han (HMGU), gave a talk on his research on Lung Single Cell Transcriptomics to Guide the Development of AOP Anchored Cell-Based Assays in Response to Nanomaterial Exposure
  • Wouter Fransman (TNO) talked about the HARMLESS Decision Support System for Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD), which will better guide users in making decisions throughout their entire design process of advanced nanomaterials – DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8099067

• Nina Jeliazkova (IDEA) together with the EU-NSC WG on Education, Training and Communication organised a training session on Data FAIRness.

Several HARMLESS partners were involved in the organising committee (Beatriz Alfaro (BNN)) and in the scientific committee (Andreas Falk (BNN), Keld Alstrup (NRCWE), Otmar Schmid (HMGU), Susanne Resch (BNN), Tobias Stöger (HMGU), and Ulla Vogel (NRCWE)). Moreover, Andreas Falk co-chaired some of the sessions in the conference. 

The joint participation of the NMBP-15 and -16 projects in the SSbD Solutions Day was a highlight, in which their approaches and results, as well as their commonalities and differences, were presented by Wouter Fransman (TNO) among others. 

Furthermore, on 8 June, the three NMBP-16 projects (DIAGONAL, HARMLESS, SUNSHINE) held an NMBP-16 Ambassadors meeting in a hybrid format, as reported here, where we were able to align our work, exchange information with each other and define the future interactions between the three projects.

The conference program can be viewed here and the book of abstracts is available here.

For more information about the conference, videos and more pictures of the event, visit the nanosafe2023 webpage.

View social media posts from the conference using the hashtags #nanosafe2023 on Twitter and LinkedIn!

Some impressions from the event: