Perspectives of nanotoxicology: Introduction.

Abstract

The set of nano-scale technologies applied to medicine today is broad and contains products and techniques which are at various stages of development. Public awareness and acceptance of nanomedicines is growing due to the development of safe and effective lipid nanoparticles mRNA COVID vaccines. In “ early ” days when researchers first studied nanomedicines, they did not have a good understanding of the unique mechanisms of nanomaterial toxicity and what safety biomarkers and endpoints were relevant to the development of safe nanomedicines. This state of affairs has now changed; it is well-accepted that to obtain accurate results, a multitude of tests must be performed in order to assess the safety of any nanomedicines under development and to ensure that novel mechanisms of toxicity have been properly defined. It is the goal of this review issue focused on nanotoxicology, to get a perspective of different facets of this topic from a broad international cohort of scholars active in this field. It is not a textbook of nanotoxicology and does not attempt to comprehensively cover all areas that could fall under this large umbrella. Instead, it focuses on topics that are relevant to the type of nanomedicines researchers and scientists are working on in the field today. The area of nanosafety assessment has been a concerted effort among government regulators, industrial sponsors, academicians, and the public to determine the potential hazards of nanotechnology. This Nanotoxicology specialty issue begins with an overview “ Toxicokinetics, dose-response and risk assessment of nanomaterials: methodology, challenges, and future perspectives ” of the methods used to conduct toxicokinetic, hazard identification, dose – response, exposure, and risk-assessment of nanomaterials. It specifically focuses on the experimen-tal design of plasma and tissue toxicokinetic