Safety Assessment of Nanomaterials Using Toxicokinetics and Toxicoproteome Analysis

Abstract

With recent development of the nanotechnology, nanomaterials have been successfully employed in various industrial applications such as medicine and cosmetics. Nanomaterials show the useful properties such as electronic reactivity and the tissue permeability that were not provided by micromaterials. Thus, nanomaterials are expected as innovative materials for the development of medicine and cosmetics. However, these innovative properties may show unknown biological responses that could not been detected by the conventional toxicity assay. For industrial development and affluent society establishment that enjoyed only a benefit of nanomaterials, it is urgent to gather information of the properties and the biological effects, and to establish the standard safety evaluation method of nanomaterials. So, we are analyzing association among property, biodistribution and biological effects of nanomaterials to search for the safety biomarker (functional-, molecular- and biochemical-biomarker) using nanosilicas (nSP) as a standard nanomaterial. Because nSP shows high uniform dispersibility and is already used in medicine, cosmetics and food additive, the results of this study are useful to extrapolate it to other nanomaterials and to make practicable as safety biomarker. In this report, we show the latest knowledge about the linkage information among property, biodistribution and biological effects of nSP by toxicokinetics and toxicoproteomics, and the search study of safety biomarker based on these basic information.