Rethinking Nanosafety: Harnessing Progress and Driving Innovation

摘要

This Special Issue brings together the best thought leaders in the field of nanosafety to inform, guide and direct the current and future directions of nanosafety research for the betterment of human and environmental health. Nanotechnology has long been recognized as an enabling technology underpinning advances across all industrial, governmental and societal sectors, and as such, the need to ensure that these technologies and their applications are safe is paramount. Indeed, worldwide a significant fraction of the total investment in nanotechnology has been focused on safety aspects, considering occupational exposure and consumer safety as priority areas. Since nanomaterials operate on the same sizescale and speed as biology, and can harness the proteins and other biomolecules used in nature to provide cellular structure and function by binding them to their surfaces and utilizing them to effectively engage with cellular receptors, nanomaterials have unprecedented access to living systems, offering the potential to cross biological barriers, to target specific cells and to deliver cargo to specific organelles. Indeed, this is the promise of nanomedicine, although the precision with which we can produce and functionalize nanomaterials is not yet nearly as refined as that of nature's tightly regulated signaling systems. However, as we explore nanomaterials interactions with living systems, to map and quantify the changes at cellular, tissue, organism and population levels, we are learning an enormous amount about how biology functions, as well as how nanomaterials function. Thus, nanosafety, rather than being just a necessary aspect of nanomaterials development and application, and a cornerstone of regulation, is a flourishing, innovative and exciting area of research, leveraging developments in chemoinformatics, systems toxicology and small molecule chemistry, and mixing them up with advances in analytical approaches, to produce exciting innovations. Nanosafety res