HARMLESS @ NanoTrust 2023

NanoTrust-Advanced, a project of the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) organised on 14th September 2023 the 15^th NanoTrust Conference in Vienna (Austria), under the topic “Innovation and Governance of Advanced Materials“. Around 80 international people from academia and policy makers attended the event.

Our colleague Andrea Haase (from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR)) gave an oral presentation within the session on “Advanced Materials Research”. Her talk was about Novel Methods (NAMs) for the risk assessment of nanomaterials. The regulatory implementation of NAMs is an important overarching issue, but it has particular relevance for nanomaterials and other advanced materials. The numerous material variants cannot be assessed efficiently in conventional ways. Therefore, the development of NAMs for nanomaterials is of particular importance. Andrea Haase reported in her talk about the work that is being carried out, among other projects, in HARMLESS. Concretely in WP3 “New Approach Methodology – in vitro and in silico data generation”, they are working specifically on many different NAMs, which might then be used for assessments, as well as for Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design approaches.