Report from the Nanosafety conference in Malaga co-organised by five FP7 projects

 

The week of 6-9^th February saw the European nanosafety community converge in Malaga for the “New Tools and approaches for nanosafety assessment” conference, jointly organised by 5 of the large FP7 projects ending around now.  The 5 projects were: the sister projects NanoSolutions and NanoMILE, who were investigating mechanisms of toxicity of nanomaterials and developing mechanistic-based classification and grouping approaches, the sister projects GUIDEnano and SUN focussing on development of tools for risk evaluation and mitigation and decision support tools to support industry and regulators, and the data and ontology project eNanoMapper.

 

The conference showcased the outputs from 4 years of research from these 5 projects, via keynote presentations and short highlight presentations, as well as featuring short presentations from experts across Europe and beyond selected from the submitted abstracts.  Overall, there were 75 short presentations, 2 posters sessions (close to 100 posters) and 2 panel discussions, one focussing on “Stakeholder engagement – lessons learned and the path forward for H2020 projects – multi-stakeholder perspectives” and  the other addressing “Ensuring the legacy of EU-funded project outputs: strategies and supports needed” featuring panellists from the USA, Brazil, EU and spanning industry, industry organisations, funding agencies, standardisation bodies, international organisations, large enterprise and regulatory and policy organisations.  A report on the stakeholder discussions is in preparation and will be shared with the community in due course.  However, the key message was that a huge body of data has now been generated, and the quality of the data presented across the 3 days was complemented, but there is now a real need to integrate this dataset into clear, consistent key messages for use by industry, regulators and policy makers.

 

A best poster award, sponsored by RSC journal Environmental Science: Nano was presented to Susan Dekkers from RIVM for her poster entitled “The influence of redox activity of inhaled nano-sized cerium dioxide on respiratory, immune and cardiovascular effects in multiple mouse models”.  This was selected by a panel of roving judges who assessed the posters over the 2 days.

 

The 220 participants came from all 27 EU countries, as well as South Africa, USA, China, South Korea and beyond.  For those that couldn’t be present, the entire conference has been recorded, and will be made available online via a dedicated landing page hosted by Inclusive Digital as well as via the individual project websites and with links from the EU Nanosafety cluster webpage.  Several short movies are also being prepared, featuring interviews with the various project coordinators, members of the stakeholder panels and more.  Tweets were tagged with #nmsa2017.

Below some picture of the event