Read-across approaches, which are currently absent for NMs, in large part as a result of data fragmentation and inaccessibility, would reduce the cost of nanosafety research and regulation dramatically by removing the need for extensive laboratory and animal testing.

The availability of a nanosafety knowledge infrastructure, that organises and visualises data and data relationships, makes it accessible, integrates computational tools for risk assessment and decision support, enables their validation and facilitates the necessary grouping will be a critical factor in reducing regulatory costs.

The H2020 Infrastructures project, NanoCommons, addresses this gap by creating a community framework and infrastructure for reproducible science, and in particular in silico workflows for nanomaterials and beyond.

NanoCommons has the unique potential to deliver a step-changing impact for the emerging nanoinformatics in nanosafety community. It will remove barriers from nanosafety-related regulatory & industry processes by revolutionising data capture, management & sharing. NanoCommons will achieve this through:

1. its integration of disparate datasets, tools and modelling approaches from across the 60+ projects related to nanosafety-funded across FP6, FP7 and H2020 (NA),
2. its development of an integrated KnowledgeBase to facilitate development and application of regulatory tools such as QSARs, grouping and read-across (JRA); and
3. its efforts to support Users (all stakeholders: academia, industry, regulators etc.) in their utilisation of the appropriate tools and supporting expertise to address their data and research needs (TA).