The ‘Joint Risk Assessor Summit on Advancing Safety & Sustainability Assessments of Advanced Materials’ hosted by ACCORDs, iCARE, MACRAMÉ, and nanoPASS, was a full success.
To address new challenges for safety and sustainability assessment coming with advanced materials, the EU Horizon Europe projects ACCORDs, iCARE, MACRAMÉ, and nanoPASS hosted the Joint Regulatory Risk Assessors Summit on 19th and 20th June 2025 in Paris at the OECD. Around 100 international experts from 15 EU countries, Switzerland, Australia, Argentina, Japan, Malaysia, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand attended the Summit. The Summit enabled the direct engagement with experts from academia (40%), industry (19%), service providers (11%), regulation (11%), policy making (6) and NGOs (3%) and others (e.g. general public, press) (9%). Furthermore, the Summit brought together experts in material characterisation, toxicology, lifecycle assessment and others and therewith bridged between the different disciplines.
The summit was opened by a keynote lecture on the needs of regulatory and policy frameworks to support safe and sustainable advanced materials, followed by a top-class panel, sharing their view form the regulatory, academic, industrial and OECD perspective. The focus sessions highlighted challenges and solutions in testing industrial relevant samples along their lifecycle towards physical-chemical properties, human toxicology, environmental toxicology including fate and transformation. Recommendations on further development and standardisation of test method adequate for advanced materials were discussed by the participants in breakout groups.
The presentations and posters can be found by following this link.
The summit was a great success. The insights and results will be further disseminated and used by the four projects. The summit highlighted that the implementation of chemical and material regulation and its enforcement require pragmatic and regulatory relevant test methods that are cost-effective, reproducible and applicable across advanced materials along their lifecycle.
“Good regulation without implementation is only a good advice.”
[Mar Gonzalez, OECD]
Prioritisation, standardisation and harmonisation are critical to support implementation and adoption of test methods for regulatory purposes. There is a strong need to align research with regulatory needs from early on, to ensure that methods feed into OECD and EU frameworks efficiently. In addition, improved communication and shared understanding between the different stakeholders including definitions, data formats and expectations is required. Digital tools, FAIR data and AI-based analyses were often mentioned as future enablers, including the remaining concerns towards validation and regulatory acceptance. Lack of sustained, strategically coordinated funding to bridge the gap between research, validation and regulatory uptake is delaying the enforcement of regulation and hindering innovation.
Further input on the recommendations towards test methods is highly appreciated via the survey until 7th September 2025.
A MACRAMÉ Webinar on the recommendations will take place on the 25th September 2025 14:00-16:00 CEST online: follow this link to find out more.
Safe-the-date: the 3rd Joint Workshop: Harmonisation & Standardisation of Test Methods for Nanomaterials and Advanced Materials – Continuing the NanoHarmony NANOMET Journey will be held online on the 3rd & 4th November 2025.
