EU NanoSafety Cluster Releases EU-U.S. Roadmap Nanoinformatics 2030

The European Union (EU) released the EU US Roadmap Nanoinformatics 2030 on November 15, 2018.  The Roadmap, developed by scientists from the EU, U.S., and a few other countries, is a compilation of state-of-the-art commentaries from multiple interconnecting scientific fields, combined with issues involving nanomaterial risk assessment and governance.  The Roadmap states that in bringing these issues together into a coherent set of milestones, the authors address three recognized challenges facing nanoinformatics:  (1) limited data sets; (2) limited data access; and (3) regulatory requirements for validating and accepting computational models.  According to the Roadmap, it is also recognized that data generation will progress unequally and unstructured if not captured within a nanoinformatics framework based on harmonized, interconnected databases and standards.  The implicit coordination efforts within such a framework ensure early use of the data for regulatory purposes, e.g., for the read-across method of filling data gaps.  The Roadmap expects readers to be experts in specialized fields interested in understanding developments in nanoinformatics, and the authors have written the Roadmap to be understandable by a broad audience.  The Roadmap consists of three sections:  an administrative section (executive summary, definitions and context, objectives); a technically oriented informatics section (informatics, materials modeling, statistical computation, omics bioinformatics), and a community of practice section (stakeholders, database projects, initiatives, and milestones and pilot projects).