NanoCommons - A Knowledge Infrastructure for Risk Assessment of Novel and Emerging Materials

Abstract

Nanotechnology represents an enabling technology with the potential for major breakthroughs in diverse industrial sectors. However, processes at the nanoscale, where novel material properties occur, have also been linked to new or different potential risks, that are still not fully understood. While recent advances provided new insights on what constitutes toxicity of novel and emerging materials (NEMs) in relation to health and environmental hazards, the nanotechnology and nanosafety communities remain disparate and unconnected, whilst knowledge and data remain fragmented and inaccessible. To address this gap, the project NanoCommons will create an openly accessible e-infrastructure serving the current and future needs of the key research communities, pivotal industrial users and regulators. NanoCommons brings all stakeholders (academia, industry and regulators) together to facilitate pooling and harmonising of methods and data for modelling, safe-by-design product development and regulatory approval purposes, thereby driving best practice, and ensuring maximum access to data and tools and promote data interoperability and translational research. NanoCommons combines: Networking Activities (NA) to span community needs assessment through development of demonstration case studies (e.g. exemplar regulatory dossiers),   Joint Research Activities (JRA) to integrate existing resources and embed efficient data management process from the data generation step (facilitated using online laboratory notebooks), to (efficient and harmonised) data curation, preservation and provision of Open and FAIR access to data/models and,   Transnational Access (TA) to provide users with funded access to the data, methods and tools generated or developed under the project. NanoCommons also offers expert guidance along the entire data lifecycle (experimental workflows, data acquisition/analysis/storage, metadata generation, publications etc.) ensuring data quality, completeness and harmonisation into the future. NanoCommons has the unique potential to deliver a step-changing impact for the emerging nanoinformatics in nanosafety community. It will remove barriers from nanosafety-related regulatory and industry processes by revolutionising data capture, management and sharing (FAIR data). [1] Valsami-Jones, Eugenia, and Iseult Lynch. Science 350.6259 (2015) [2] Robinson, Richard L. Marchese, et al. Nanoscale 8.19 (2016) [3] Hastings, Janna, et al. Journal of biomedical semantics 6.1 (2015)