Risk assessment of nanocarriers

Last September, work began at BOKU on a new project for the risk assessment of nanocarriers. Researchers from three BOKU institutes - the Institute for Safety and Risk Sciences, the Institute for Waste and Recycling Management and the Institute for Synthetic Bioarchitectures - have joined forces for this project.

Nanocarriers are the smallest synthetic carrier structures used primarily in agriculture for pesticides and fertilizers or in medicine for the targeted administration of drugs.

In the three-year project, the environmental risks of nanocarriers are to be investigated, or more precisely: test strategies are to be developed and implemented for particularly critical nanocarriers, which will allow their environmental behavior and the release of the transported active ingredient to be investigated under environmentally relevant conditions. In this way, the influence of the carriers on the change in the environmental behavior of active substances is to be determined as an example and the implications for an appropriate evaluation of the environmental behavior in the context of risk assessment are to be described in more detail. The results should help to adapt the guidelines for the risk assessment of nanocarriers to the latest developments.

Participating institutes and scientists*:

Institute for Safety and Risk Sciences:
Dr. Bernd Giese (Co-Project Leader)
Dr. Christina Himpfinger 

Institute for Waste and Recycling Management:
DI Dr. Florian Part (Co-Project Leader)
Mag Sabine Greßler
Ass.Prof. Mag Dr. Christian Zaflu

Institute for Synthetic Bioarchitectures:
Univ.Prof. Dr. Eva-Kathrin Ehmoser
Anna Pavlicek, MSc. MSc.