The MACRAMÉ Project team has published an Innovation Report about its Project’s R&I approach.
In the paper entitled ‘MACRAMÉ – Advanced characterisation methodologies to assess and predict the health and environmental risks of advanced materials‘, the authors describe the planned information-flow between the different R&I activities conducted in the Project (see Figure 1).
The MACRAMÉ Project focuses on the safe and sustainable integration of AdMas (advanced materials) into industrial, medical, and consumer products. It addresses critical gaps in the detection, characterisation, and assessment of AdMas.
The Project’s scope extends beyond traditional nanomaterial analysis, targeting real-world applications across diverse lifecycle stages including integration into multi-component products and interactions with biological systems, together labelled as complex matrices. Key industries covered include energy (storage), healthcare, transportation, and consumer products. One of the major targets is to contribute to policies, standards, and guidance towards safety and sustainability, aligning with the EU’s Green Deal strategic pillar of a zero-pollution ambition for a toxic-free environment (see Figure 2).
The MACRAMÉ project aims to achieve several high-level objectives, including:
- ommunity Integration and Methodological Streamlining: MACRAMÉ is establishing interfaces among regulatory, industrial, and scientific communities to align methodologies for assessing risks associated with AdMas in complex matrices (AdMa@CMs);
- Lifecycle Exposure and Sampling Assessment: MACRAMÉ is evaluating AdMas across five industrial use cases to identify exposure points and lifecycle transformations, ensuring their safety in real-world applications;
- Advanced Characterisation Techniques: MACRAMÉ is developing and harmonising state-of-the-art detection and imaging methods for AdMas, including physical, chemical, and biological characterisation;
- Hazard and Toxicity Testing: MACRAMÉ is advancing in vitro and ex vivo models to assess inhalation risks of AdMas, focusing on tiered testing frameworks for regulatory applications; MACRAMÉ is also innovating in ecotoxicological assessment, extending the range of fish cell lines used for in vitro testing and assessing the adaptations to exposure scenarios needed for OECD tests in algae and daphnids;
- Standardisation and Regulatory Readiness: MACRAMÉ is supporting global harmonisation by contributing pre-validated methods to organisations like the OECD, ISO, and CEN;
- Data Stewardship and FAIR Principles: MACRAMÉ is implementing a centralized data hub to ensure adherence to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, and implementing instance maps as a tool to track AdMas material and data provenance, thereby fostering transparency and knowledge sharing.
The resulting efficiency and effectiveness of the MACRAMÉ Methods are demonstrated through their application in Use-Case evaluations, using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA-), Life Cycle Costing (LCC-) and SSbD-based approaches, highlighting benefits like reduced costs of regulatory compliance, by following the process developed in the MACRAMÉ Safety & Sustainability Matrix. This matrix is a modular building block for MACRAMÉ ’s information-transfer interfaces for different scientific and regulatory communities, and will thus provide a stepping-stone for Europe’s route towards a ‘one substance – one assessment’ approach and promote an open strategic autonomy through key enabling and emerging technologies, including digital ones.
In conclusion, the MACRAMÉ Project has and will have achieved a significant impact on the safe and sustainable development of AdMas by developing reliable, pre-validated, and scalable methods for characterizing AdMa within their different value-chains, assessing, and managing impacts across their lifecycles. A central accomplishment is the establishment of a CML, which has become the foundation for experimental and regulatory assessments. Furthermore, the Project integrates SSbD principles into its methodologies, aligning closely with the EU’s Green Deal objectives.
The practical implications of MACRAMÉ ’s work extend beyond the immediate project outcomes, providing a pathway for long-term innovation in material science and environmental safety. The integration of advanced imaging techniques and lifecycle models for AdMas into regulatory processes will accelerate the adoption of safer and more sustainable practices across industries, from automotive to electronics.
The full Innovation Report is available here.
