Prospective Risk Assessment of Materials

Prospective approaches to risk assessment have gained significance beyond the field of technology assessment and are now also being adopted and promoted at the regulatory level. Their particular advantage lies in their ability to assess potential risks early on in innovation processes. In this way, they enable safety assessments to be targeted and technologies to be designed with risk mitigation in mind. To enable prospective risk assessment as early as possible in the development process, a number of methods have been developed in recent years. These methods account for as broad a spectrum as possible of risk-relevant properties of nanomaterials and advanced materials without requiring extensive experimental testing of these materials. The project aims to further develop these methods and adapt them to the requirements of specific materials such as nanocarriers or micro- and nanoplastic particles.