First Advances of the Guidance Platform Allowing the Development of Safer Nanomaterials and Nano-Enabled Products

Since its kick-off in March 2020, the SAbyNA project coordinated by Leitat has made quite some progress. Leitat One particularly interesting field is the development of the SAbyNA Guidance Platform, which will be the main outcome of the project. The Guidance Platform aims to bring together the many existing resources that can support the implementation of Safe by Design strategies in a way that these will be useable for enterprises, particularly small entreprises.

Some of the developments until now have focused on ensuring that the platform will use a vocabulary that is recognizable and meaningful for users, and that it clearly responds to a felt need and deliver useful, useable results, and respect the user’s constraints (commercial, practical, regulatory, strategic…). An initial workflow for the SAbyNA platform has been drafted which is under discussion and refinement within the consortium. In order to enhance the usability and value of the Guidance Platform, the consortium is currently preparing a questionnaire for industry users, and a stakeholder workshop using questionnaire results.

The Guidance Platform aims to help businesses with safety issues when working with nanomaterials. Users, mainly businesses, must be able to learn something from the platform that is rapidly useful. They should not have to invest heavy learning efforts. The platform must adapt to them, not the other way around. This justifies the consortium’s upstream efforts to tailor the platform to user needs and possibilities. The consortium considers that the platform should offer a relation of confidence with data demands and data protection that convince users of the value of the platform. At the end of the day, enterprises need to develop a product that can be sold, according to existing regulations and considering its safety from a global point of view.