An increasing number of nanomaterials (NMs) are entering the market in every day products spanning from health care and leisure to electronics, cosmetics and foodstuff. Nanotechnology is a truly enabling technology, with unlimited potential for innovation. However, the novelty in properties and forms of NMs makes the development of a well-founded and robust legislative framework to ensure safe development of nano-enabled products particularly challenging. At the heart of the challenge lies the difficulty in the reliable and reproducible characterisation of NMs given their extreme diversity and dynamic nature, particularly in complex environments, such as within different biological, environmental and technological compartments. Two key steps can resolve this: 1) the development of a holistic framework for reproducible NM characterisation, spanning from initial needs assessment through method selection to data interpretation and storage; and 2) the embedding of this framework in an operational, linked-up ontological regime to allow identification of causal relationships between NMs properties, be they intrinsic, extrinsic or calculated, and biological, (eco)toxicological and health impacts fully embedded in a mechanistic risk assessment framework. ACEnano was conceived in response to the NMBP 26 call with the aim to comprehensively address these two steps. More specifically ACEnano will introduce confidence, adaptability and clarity into NM risk assessment by developing a widely implementable and robust tiered approach to NM physico-chemical characterisation that will simplify and facilitate contextual (hazard or exposure) description and its transcription into a reliable NMs grouping framework. This will be achieved by the creation of a conceptual “toolbox” that will facilitate decision-making in choice of techniques and SOPs, linked to a characterisation ontology framework for grouping and risk assessment and a supporting data management system.

NanoSolveIT will introduce a ground-breaking in silico Integrated Approach to Testing and Assessment (IATA) for the environmental health and safety of Nanomaterials (NM), implemented as a decision support system packaged as a standalone open software and a Cloud platform. NanoSolveIT will develop and deliver: (i) a reliable user friendly knowledge-based infrastructure for data hosting, sharing and exploitation, (ii) NM fingerprints, sets of nanodescriptors and properties that can be predictively linked to NM functionality, exposure and hazard, thereby supporting NM grouping, safe-by-design (SbD) and regulatory risk assessment (RA), (iii) innovative methodologies for NMs predictive (eco)toxicology underpinned by artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art in silico techniques, and, (iv) integration with multi-scale modelling, RA and governance frameworks developed in EU H2020 funded and in the forthcoming NMBP-13 project(s). NanoSolveIT will deliver a validated, sustainable, multi-scale nanoinformatics IATA, tested and demonstrated at TLR6 via OECD style IATA case studies, serving the needs of diverse stakeholders at each stage of the NMs value chain, for assessment of potential adverse effects of NM on human health and the environment. NanoSolveIT is fully aligned to the objectives of the EU-US Nanoinformactics Roadmap, addressing all 13 of its short, medium and long term milestones, and supports the recommendations of the EMMC on standards for developing material modelling software and OECD best practice. The NanoSolveIT consortium (EU and international partners) is the only grouping capable of delivering the ambitious goals of the NMBP-14-2018 call, since they have collectively driven most of the current progress in nanoinformatics: 81% of the nanoinormatics papers cited in the EU-US nanoinformatics roadmap had NanoSolveIT authors. NanoSolveIT will integrate across the consortium-wide modelling approaches to provide the IATA platform for in silico NMs RA.