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Doris Hammerschmidt

EU HORIZON funds nanoPASS consortium with more than 3 million euros

Environmental Health,

From 2023 to 2027, nanoPASS will unite research labs, technology and industrial companies to achieve an ambitious goal: to close the knowledge gaps in nanosafety testing.

Within the consortium, LHI PIs Tobias Stöger and Markus Rehberg (Helmholtz Munich) get about 600.000 € for their research on an animal-free prediction of the effects of (nano)materials on human health.

The problem so far: The current animal-based testing of materials’ short- and long-term health effects is slow, expensive, and has limited capacity. This stifles the development of new (nano)materials and hinders efficient regulation of the market. To enable cost-efficient high-throughput screening, nanoPASS shifts the focus of nanosafety testing from late endpoints to early key events leading to adverse outcomes.

The LHI scientists want to develop physiologically relevant in vitro models for the high spatiotemporal live-cell detection of the early key events related to different fates of lung injury and inflammation.

The key bridging methods:

  • Intravital in vivo microscopy and quantitative time-lapse in vitro microscopies
  • Automated identification of the modes of action with proprietary in silico algorithms - supported by datamining of the worlds’ largest in vivo database and single-cell omics data
  • Computational modelling of structure-function relationships.

Bringing all this together in the next five years, the consortium nanoPASS covers the whole value chain of the new animal-free safety testing technology, and thus paves the way towards safe adoption of new nanotechnologies.

About HORIZON EUROPE:

Horizon Europe is the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation. It tackles climate change, helps to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and boosts the EU’s competitiveness and growth. The programme facilitates collaboration and strengthens the impact of research and innovation in developing, supporting and implementing EU policies while tackling global challenges. It supports creating and better dispersing of excellent knowledge and technologies.

Legal entities from the EU and associated countries can participate.