Safer by design strategies

Throughout the EU funded FP7 project GUIDENano, we are trying to control and monitor the evolution of nano-enable products during their lifecycle. Small alterations of the nanoparticle (NP) state may have critical consequences on the NP behaviour and performance. For this reason it is important to highlight the importance of an extensive and proper characterization to define the NP physico-chemical characteristics under several environmental conditions. Furthermore, this characterization is necessary to ensure that obtained results are reproducible and allow understanding the behaviour of the NP on biological systems. In this paper different strategies reported in the literature regarding the safety-by-design concept are summarized. Several strategies from the synthetic point of view that help us to modulate the main factors which determine the safety of nanomaterials are proposed.