Impact/Purpose:

1) to develop and validate cell culture models as surrogates for multiple routes of exposure to evaluate toxicity of manufactured nanomaterials so as to deal with the diversity and expense of nanomaterials as well as decrease use of animals to evaluate their in vivo toxicity. 2) comparative toxicity of manufactured nanomaterials with environmental derived ultra-fine particles (ambient air, combustion sources) so as to understand the whether engineered nanomaterials display unique toxicities or health effects. 3) Identify nanomaterial physicochemical properties that regulate their toxicity.

Description:

Nanotechnology represents a very enabling technology that has the potential of representing the next industrial revolution since it will provide technology that will impact commercial, environmental, security, consumer, and medical sectors. However, there is a high level of risk assessment uncertainty with nanotechnology since it has and will provide a wide diversity of manufactured nanomaterials with unknown toxicities. The National Nanotechnology Initiative Act signed into law Dec. 2003 acknowledges this situation and has recommended research to be done to begin to address this issue in order that nanotechnology can be developed in a responsible manner. Identifying the health effects as well as development of test methods that would function as Tier 1 level of toxicity screening are needed to provide timely information on the relative toxicity associated with the wide diversity of manufactured nanomaterials and their composites are high priority research needs. The goals of the research described is to: 1) develop a high throughput in vitro comparative toxicogenomic approach to assess the toxicity of manufactured carbon and metal-based nanomaterials; 2) relate their toxicity to their unique physicochemical properties (hazard identification) in order to identify appropriate toxic metric; and 3) relate their toxicity to combustion and occupationally derived ultrafine particles.

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