Update on Lead Campuses

by Mika Pringle Tolson

Andre Nel, Director of the Lead Campus in Nanotoxiocology

Nanotoxicology

Andre Nel, Professor of Medicine at UCLA and Director of the TSR&TP Lead Campus in Nanotoxicology provided an update on his program's activities. He said nanotechnology now constitutes one of the most rapidly growing industries on earth where an increasing number of consumer products are being made. These manmade materials can interact on a nanoscale with life. "A technology this diverse in such a huge array of products needs a new approach to toxicity testing," said Nel. In spite of current regulations, fewer than 1,000 of the 80,000 chemicals in commerce have been assessed because it has overwhelmed our resources Ð each one costs up to $1 million and takes 2-3 years to evaluate. "We need high throughput testing in this century," exclaimed Nel.

The Nanotoxicology Lead Campus and the new UC Center for Environmental Implications for Nanotechnology (UC CEIN) based at UCLA have taken on this challenge. Through a number of studies, they have focused on the oxidative stress pathway to assess nanohazards. Researchers in the UC CEIN are performing high throughput screening and data mining that can be used to rank nanomaterials for risk and priority to decide what to test in living systems. They have developed a computerized expert system to integrate data and artificial intelligence to help make decisions. By the time they have evaluated 80,000 materials, they will have a system in place that will be closer to what the National Academy of Sciences has predicted what should be happening in toxicology.

Oladele Ogunseitan, Director of the Lead Campus in Green Materials

Green Materials

"In the last five years, the World Health Organization has been performing the burden of disease estimates to determine what we should be focusing on - besides unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene, lead was singled out as a hazard," said Oladele Ogunseitan, director of the TSR&TP Lead Campus in Research and Education in Green Materials. About 30 percent of the global burden of disease is caused by environmental risk factors in part because of toxic exposures from consumer products. How we change the materials we use in society is very likely to change the burden of disease. "We need to make consumers want these kinds of products at a reasonable cost," said Ogunseitan.

This is where the lead campus comes in. Their mission is to educate and conduct research that will lead to the adoption of less toxic materials. They are introducing courses to students to get them thinking about creating solutions in consumer products. This joint graduate fellowship and research program is a collaboration between UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC Davis that encourages participation by other campuses. UC Davis is focused on product engineering and consumer behavior and UCI and UCR on comparative toxicology and regulatory policy.

The Green Materials program currently has five fellows and several students working on projects. In the first year of the program, they have developed capstone courses in green engineering and environmentally-sustainable manufacturing that were livecast to other UC campuses to facilitate cross-disciplinary training among fellows and students in the program. They have an industrial advisory board to help them understand the implications of their research. The program sponsored a webinar in San Francisco on electronic waste management and they have a synergy with California State initiatives such as the Green Chemistry Initiative, signed into law recently. The program will also continue working with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control and the state's public health agencies in the future.

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