Grouping of nanomaterials to read-across hazard endpoints: from data collection to assessment of the grouping hypothesis by application of chemoinformatic techniques

An increasing number of manufactured nanomaterials (NMs) are being used in industrial products and need to be registered under the REACH legislation. The hazard characterisation of all these forms is not only technically challenging but resource and time demanding. The use of non-testing strategies like read-across is deemed essential to assure the assessment of all NMs in due time and at lower cost. The fact that read-across is based on the structural similarity of substances represents an additional difficulty for NMs as in general their structure is not unequivocally defined. In such a scenario, the identification of physicochemical properties affecting the hazard potential of NMs is crucial to define a grouping hypothesis and predict the toxicological hazards of similar NMs. In order to promote the read-across of NMs, ECHA has recently published “Recommendations for nanomaterials applicable to the guidance on QSARs and Grouping”, but no practical examples were provided in the document. Due to the lack of publicly available data and the inherent difficulties of reading-across NMs, only a few examples of read-across of NMs can be found in the literature. This manuscript presents the first case study of the practical process of grouping and read-across of NMs following the workflow proposed by ECHA.

LAMON Lara;  ASTURIOL BOFILL David;  RICHARZ Andrea;  JOOSSENS Elisabeth;  GRAEPEL Rabea;  ASCHBERGER Karin;  WORTH Andrew; 

2018-11-14

BIOMED CENTRAL LTD

JRC109297

1743-8977 (online),   

https://particleandfibretoxicology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12989-018-0273-1,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC109297,   

10.1186/s12989-018-0273-1 (online),