Predictive Toxicological Approach and High Throughput Screening
for Nanosafety Assessment
Zhaoxia Ji
UC Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Engineered nanomaterials (ENM) provide tremendous opportunities for enabling new
technologies that could address urgent societal needs.
However, there are concerns over
potential environmental, health and safety impacts of these materials as a result of the novel
physicochemical properties that may generate hazardous biological outcomes.
In order to
assess ENM hazard, reliable and reproducible screening approaches are needed.
At UC
Centre of Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology, we propose a predictive toxicological
approach that utilizes mechanism-based high-throughput screening (HTS) in vitro to make
predictions about the physicochemical properties of ENMs that may lead to the generation of
pathology or disease outcomes in vivo.
In this talk, I will review the tools required for
establishing predictive toxicology paradigm and discuss some of the major injury paradigms that
have emerged through the use of well characterized ENM libraries and mechanism-based HTS
assays.