Development of safe-by-design nanomaterials (Opening Lecture) - part I
Françoise PONS (Université de Strasbourg, France)
Abstract:
The research on nanomaterials is rapidly expending. Due to their small size and their particular properties, nanomaterials are indeed likely to help removing technological obstacles in strategic areas such as the health, the energy, the environment, or the technologies of information and communication. However, from a toxicological point of view, nanomaterials are similar to urban or industrial airborne particles, the respiratory and cardiovascular toxicity of which is demonstrated or strongly suspected. With the development of nanotechnologies, a branch of toxicology designated nanotoxicology was thus born.
This new discipline aims to define the potential health hazards of nanomaterials designed by humans for medical or industrial purposes, but also to understand what are, among the composition, the size, the charge or the surface properties, the determining factors in the toxicity, and by the same in the safety of these objects. By means of examples from the literature and our own research, the presentation will make a state of knowledge on the physicochemical characteristics that are likely to contribute to the toxicity of nanomaterials, as well as the difficulties that biologists can sometimes meet to study these objects. Then, we will see how, on the basis of this knowledge, toxicology can help chemists and galenists to develop "safe-by-design" nanomaterials.
