Nanotechnology Poses Some New Challenges for Risk Assessment

Watertown, Mass. April 11, 2007-Many assumptions about risk assessment and risk management that work in the macro world we all inhabit will also work for nanotechnology and nanomaterials, but some issues may be unique to nanomaterials because of their small size, Dr. Jo Anne Shatkin, a Cadmus principal and head of the company’s Risk, Health, and Safety Practice, recently told the online NanoReg Report.

“Some have suggested that the surface area of [a nanoparticle] is really a key parameter in determining how much of the material produces a toxic effect and whether it correlates very well with the responses that are observed,” said Dr. Shatkin, an expert in risk assessment and the author or co-author of several papers on nanotechnology.

“Others have suggested that it might be the charge of the particle that affects how much it can be absorbed across the cell membrane. That’s really an electrical interaction that has to happen on the membrane. Some new metrics to describe the exposure are needed for nano, but many of the ways we’re looking at risk, I think we can adapt for nanomaterials.”

Screening tools like the Cadmus Adaptive Risk Assessment Framework can help identify issues related to the risks to human health and the environment posed by nanomaterials for which there are not enough data to permit quantitative risk assessments, Dr. Shatkin noted.

“As new information becomes available, it can be brought back into the process and revisited,” she said. “Then before long, we have the information needed to complete a quantitative assessment.”

The framework also facilitates the appropriate management of risks before all the data are available. It is “based on the assumption that ‘We know we may not get it completely right, but at least if we start to look now and do some preliminary assessments, with an adaptive framework we can identify the data that are going to be key to our decision making, where our key uncertainties are, and go fill those data gaps first,'” Dr. Shatkin said.