NanoSolveIT integration of tools for assessment of human and environmental exposure to nanomaterials

Chapter 4. Risk assessment for chemicals including nanomaterials requires information on both the likely exposure to the chemicals, in terms of concentration, duration and form, and their hazard to the organisms they come into contact with. Case-by-case determination of exposure and hazard data for each individual nanomaterial variant is not possible due to the time and cost required, and thus there is a strong incentive to develop computational models that can predict human and environmental exposure to nanomaterials based on a reduced set of input parameters as part of an Integrated Approach to Testing and Assessment. Here we report the integration of two exposure models, one predicting human indoor exposure to nanomaterials (the multibox model) and the other predicting environmental exposure to nanomaterials in freshwater at the catchment scale (the NanoFASE water-soil-organism model). Both were developed in previous research projects, and NanoSolveIT has developed the Graphical User Interfaces and NanoSolveIT Application Programming Interface to allow users to access and run the models easily, either as stand-alone open software or via the NanoSolveIT Cloud platform. This represents the first steps toward establishment of a complete integrated in-silico platform for exposure, hazard, and risk assessment of nanomaterials.