EUON, the EU Observatory for Nanomaterials Gets Boost from NanoSafety Cluster.

Brussels, 18-19 October 2017

More than 40 people from academia, regulation, and industry, the European Commission (EC) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) gathered in Brussels with the NanoSafety Cluster (NSC) to identify how EU-funded projects can pool data and leverage knowledge on the safety of nanomaterials.

The NSC Data Harmonisation workshop and joint NSC-EU-ECHA workshop on the Observatory for Nanomaterials (EUON) explored how Cluster projects can transfer their data in the EU Observatory for Nano. Two days of meeting provided valuable insight on different data strategies and practices for data handling, management and storage. More than 22 presentations from EU projects, bioinformatics specialists, database initiatives (Nanoinformatics Knowledge Commons: NIKC, eNanoMapper), industry and regulator ECHA clarified concepts, needs and expectations. An in-depth, and in many cases heated, debate was triggered on what is needed for long-term data management (curation, storage, analysis), which demonstrated the different visions and approaches, but also a common underlying goal to make the most of collected data for safety. These workshops were the first step towards the data produced by EU-funded projects being implemented within EUON and a common knowledge base, which will enable significant big data analysis. The NSC is already planning on the next steps.

NanoFASE (Nanomaterial Fate and Speciation in the Environment) had a substantial contribution with 4 scientists present (Iseult Lynch, Marianne Matzke, Damjana Drobne, Tassos Papadiamantis). The NanoFASE vision and approach were presented not only as a standalone project, but also through its strong collaborations in database management and curation as highlighted in presentations by Camille de Garidad (CEREGE) and Cristine Hendren (CEINT) on the NanoInformatics Knowledge Commons (NIKC) US-EU initiative.

The NSC Data Harmonisation Workshop took place at the University of Birmingham office in Brussels on 18 Oct and was followed by the main Workshop with ECHA on the EU Observatory for Nano (EUON) on 19 Oct 2017. The 23 NSC projects represented at the 2-day meeting include: ACEnano, Calibrate, CERASAFE, EC4SafeNano, Fibralspec, GRACIOUS, Hisents, INSPIRED, Lorcenis, ModCOMP, NanoCommons,NanoDefine, NanoFARM, NanoFASE, NanoGenTools, NanoREG II, NanoStreeM, Necomada, npSCOPE, Pandora, PATROLS, SKHINCAP, and SmartNanoTox.

• Reported by Tassos Papadiamantis (UoB), NSC Secretariat and NanoFASE project