Role of omics techniques in the toxicity testing of nanoparticles

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

• Level A · Stronger Clinical Evidence
• Level B · Emerging clinical evidence with positive signals
• Level C · Early human research exploring benefits
• Level D · Scientific groundwork from lab and animal studies
• Emerging · Emerging topic under active research

Abstract (original English)

Nanotechnology is regarded as a key technology of the twenty-first century. Despite the many advantages of nanotechnology it is also known that engineered nanoparticles (NPs) may cause adverse health effects in humans. Reports on toxic effects of NPs relay mainly on conventional (phenotypic) testing but studies of changes in epigenome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome induced by NPs have also been performed. NPs most relevant for human exposure in consumer, health and food products are metal, metal oxide and carbon-based NPs. They were also studied quite frequently with omics technologies and an overview of the study results can serve to answer the question if screening for established targets of nanotoxicity (e.g. cell death, proliferation, oxidative stress, and inflammation) is sufficient or if omics techniques are needed to reveal new targets. Regulated pathways identified by omics techniques were confirmed by phenotypic assays performed in the same study and comparison of particle types and cells by the same group indicated a more cell/organ-specific than particle specific regulation pattern. Between different studies moderate overlap of the regulated pathways was observed and cell-specific regulation is less obvious. The lack of standardization in particle exposure, in omics technologies, difficulties to translate mechanistic data to phenotypes and comparison with h

Evidence level

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

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