New technologies, apart from the numerous benefits for society, always bring some concern about the possibility of causing harm to human health or the environment. The same thing happens with nanotechnology. At the beginning of December, Brazilian researchers participated in the final preparation of NANoREG, a European Union project, started in 2014, which aims to collect information and present a set of risk assessment proposals to countries' regulatory bodies and industries addressing security aspects of nanotechnology. At the conference, a group of 180 experts from several countries debated the relevance of regulation and applicability of results based on science generated in the last 10 years on the use of nanomaterials in relation to the environment, health and safety.
“We are breaking several myths with NANoREG”, says pathologist Wagner Fávaro, professor at the Institute of Biology at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). He was the representative of the Laboratory for the Synthesis of Nanostructures and Interaction with Biosystems (Nanobioss) at Unicamp, at the final NANoREG conference held in Paris by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “With a wide network of research institutions that included, in addition to Europeans, guest researchers from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the United States, Brazil and South Korea, we were able to reach important scientific results: knowing which type of nanotube passes through biological barriers or can accumulate inside the cell, for example”, says Fávaro. “The work presented at this conference clearly demonstrated that many scientific methods and approaches have been validated and are credible for near-term regulation. It's a huge job because each test needs to be designed for each material. Many had to be redone according to previously agreed standards to avoid divergent results, as was common not so long ago.”
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