Tag Archives: ATS

Nanomaterials, toxicology, and alternatives to animal testing

It seems that alternatives to animal testing may offer some additional capabilities for nanotoxicology studies according to an Aug. 21, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

A group of international experts from government, industry and academia have concluded that alternative testing strategies (ATSs) that don’t rely on animals will be needed to cope with the wave of new nanomaterials emerging from the boom in nanoscience and nanotechnology. …

… Tests on laboratory mice, rats and other animals have been the standard way of checking new materials for health and environmental effects. Since those tests are costly, labor-intensive and time-consuming, workshop participants considered whether ATSs could have a larger role in checking the safety of ENMs [engineered nanomaterials].

They concluded that rapid cellular screening, computer modeling and other ATSs could serve as quick, cost-effective and reliable approaches for gathering certain types of information about the health and environmental effects of ENMs. “After lively discussions, a short list of generally shared viewpoints on this topic was generated, including a general view that ATS approaches for ENMs can significantly benefit chemical safety analysis,” they say.

The experts have had their consensus statement from the workshop published and before offering a citation for and a link to the statement, here’s the Abstract,

There has been a conceptual shift in toxicological studies from describing what happens to explaining how the adverse outcome occurs, thereby enabling a deeper and improved understanding of how biomolecular and mechanistic profiling can inform hazard identification and improve risk assessment. Compared to traditional toxicology methods, which have a heavy reliance on animals, new approaches to generate toxicological data are becoming available for the safety assessment of chemicals, including high-throughput and high-content screening (HTS, HCS). With the emergence of nanotechnology, the exponential increase in the total number of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) in research, development, and commercialization requires a robust scientific approach to screen ENM safety in humans and the environment rapidly and efficiently. Spurred by the developments in chemical testing, a promising new toxicological paradigm for ENMs is to use alternative test strategies (ATS), which reduce reliance on animal testing through the use of in vitro and in silico methods such as HTS, HCS, and computational modeling. Furthermore, this allows for the comparative analysis of large numbers of ENMs simultaneously and for hazard assessment at various stages of the product development process and overall life cycle. [emphasis mine] Using carbon nanotubes as a case study, a workshop bringing together national and international leaders from government, industry, and academia was convened at the University of California, Los Angeles, to discuss the utility of ATS for decision-making analyses of ENMs. …

It seems that ATS has opened the door to more comprehensive testing (as per life cycles) than has previously been possible.

For the curious, here’s the citation for and the link to the published paper,

A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective on the Use of Alternative Test Strategies for Nanomaterial Safety Assessment by Andre E. Nel, Elina Nasser, Hilary Godwin, David Avery, Tina Bahadori, Lynn Bergeson #, Elizabeth Beryt, James C. Bonner, Darrell Boverhof, Janet Carter, Vince Castranova, J. R. DeShazo, Saber M. Hussain ●, Agnes B. Kane, Frederick Klaessig, Eileen Kuempel, Mark Lafranconi, Robert Landsiedel, Timothy Malloy, Mary Beth Miller, Jeffery Morris, Kenneth Moss, Gunter Oberdorster, Kent Pinkerton, Richard C. Pleus, Jo Anne Shatkin, Russell Thomas, Thabet Tolaymat, Amy Wang, and Jeffrey Wong. ACS Nano, Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/nn4037927 Publication Date (Web): August 7, 2013

Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society

This article is behind a paywall.

Israel’s Prime Minister to offer US President Obama two nanoscale Declarations of Independence

President Barack Obama will receive his present of a nanoscale document containing the US and Israeli Declarations of Independence in Israel, according to a Mar. 19, 2013 news item by Kevin Hattori on phys.org,

In a ceremony to be held on Wednesday, March 20, [2013] in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present U.S. President Barack Obama with nano-sized inscribed replicas of the Declarations of Independence of the United States and the State of Israel. Created by scientists at the Technion’s Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI), at the request of PM Netanyahu, the Declarations appear side-by-side on a gold-coated silicon chip smaller than a pinhead. The juxtaposition symbolizes the shared values of both countries.

Hattori’s Mar. 18, 2013 news release for the American Technion Society (ATS), and the origin for the phys.org news item, provides this technical detail,

The area of the etched inscriptions is 0.04 square millimeters, and 0.00002 millimeters (20 nanometers) deep. The chip is affixed to a Jerusalem Stone dating to the Second Temple Period (1st Century BCE to 1st Century CE).

“This unique application of cutting-edge technology is just one example of Israel’s remarkable leadership in high-tech,” said Technion President Peretz Lavie.

The text was written using a focused ion beam (FIB) generator that shot tiny particles called Gallium ions onto a gold surface covering a base layer of silicon.  In a process that can be likened to digging a hole in the earth using a water jet, the ion beam etched the surface of the gold layer, making the underlying silicon layer visible.

The original image was translated into etching instructions using a special program developed for this purpose by Dr. Ohad Zohar, who conducted his Ph.D. under Prof. Uri Sivan of the Technion Physics Department. The engraving was done by Dr. Tzipi Cohen-Hyams, head of the RBNI Focused Ion Beam Lab. Other members of the team were Prof. Wayne D. Kaplan, Prof. Nir Tessler, Mr. Yaacov Shneider, Dr. Orna Ternyak, and Ms. Svetlana Yoffis.  The work was conducted in the Technion’s Sara and Moshe Zisapel Nanoelectronics Center and the Wolfson Microelectronics Research and Teaching Center.

Here’s what the chip looks like,

Chip containing U.S. and Israeli Declarations of Independence, on Jerusalem stone (downloaded from http://www.ats.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7807&news_iv_ctrl=1161]

Chip containing U.S. and Israeli Declarations of Independence, on Jerusalem stone (downloaded from http://www.ats.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7807&news_iv_ctrl=1161]

There’s also this video describing how the work was done,