On November 5, 2018, the European Commission’s (EC) Joint Research Center (JRC) announced the availability of the NANoREG Toolbox, an inventory of publicly available tools for the safety assessment of nanomaterials.  As reported in our October 5, 2017, blog item, JRC first published the inventory as a Microsoft Excel^®-based dataset.  JRC scientists have now published an article, “An inventory of ready-to-use and publicly available tools for the safety assessment of nanomaterials,” that presents a “large inventory of published and ready-to-use safety assessment tools.”  According to the JRC, the 544 tools in the inventory cover all tasks within a nanomaterial safety assessment, and the tools “are relevant and useful for similar assessments anywhere in the world.”  JRC notes that the tools also support alternative approaches to nanomaterial safety, such as safe-by-design and life cycle assessment.  JRC states that regulators, scientists, and industry use the NANoREG Toolbox as a starting point to search for available tools for specific needs.  JRC suggests that the NANoREG Toolbox could also serve as the basis for a harmonized tool database maintained by international community efforts.

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