Challenges for Assessing Toxicity of Nanomaterials

On the development of nano-world, nanotechnology provides enormous opportunities in daily routine products and further future sustainable innovations. The nanotechnology extends its benefits to various fields such as engineering, medical, biological, environmental, and communication. However, the exponential growth of nanomaterials production would lead to severe complications related to their hazardous effects to the human health and environment. Moreover, negative impact of nanomaterials toxicity on human health is one of the significant issues on exhausting nano-products. The most vulnerable situation is associated with the use of nanomaterials in the biomedical application. The several efforts have been ongoing to study the nanotoxicity and its interaction with the biomolecules. Nevertheless, it is hard to assess and validate the nanotoxicity in a biological system. This chapter aims to study the challenges in determining the toxicity of nanomaterials. The toxicity assessment and hurdles in determining the impact on biological systems are epoch making. In-vitro, in-vivo, and in-silico studies are summarized in this chapter in assessing the toxicity of engineered nanomaterials. The different approaches of toxicity assessment have their difficulties faced by researchers while characterizing nanomaterials in powder form, solution-based, and interacting with biological systems. The assessment tools and characterization techniques play a vital role in overcoming the challenges, while the cytotoxic assays involve nanoparticle shape, morphology, and size consideration