On 7th March 2024, as a hybrid, satellite event of the ANTHOS’24 summit in Vienna (Austria), SABYDOMA organised a Technology Showcase where the four years of research performed in the SABYDOMA project were highlighted. Participants were able to observe demonstrations of hardware and approaches developed during the SABYDOMA project: a hardware demo of the coupling of a nanoparticle production line with a cell line screening platform and a demonstration of the SABYDOMA Safety by Process Control approach, followed by an examination of how High Throughput Screening (HTS)-derived reference data support the SABYDOMA case studies. 

Around 56 participants (40 on-site and 16 online) from all over the world with a slight majority of male participants, from a wide range of stakeholders (61% scientific community, 22% industry, 3% innovators, 2% international organisations, 3% national authorities, 3% EU institutions, 2% civil society, 2% general public) joined the workshop (See Figures 1).

Figure 1. Representation of the different stakeholder groups among the participants.

After a warm welcome to the workshop by the project Communication & Dissemination manager Beatriz Alfaro Serrano (BNN), Prof. Andrew Nelson, SABYDOMA’s coordinator, introduced SABYDOMA’s technology to the audience. After that, our experts William Stokes and Matt Jellicoe (University of Leeds) together with Thorsten Knoll (Fraunhofer IBMT) showcased SABYDOMA’s Lead Demonstrator. This demonstrator simulated the production of nanoparticles in a compact microfluidic set-up and their transfer to a screening module with integrated optical and electrical sensing. The module can be used to investigate the toxicological effect of the nanoparticles on living biological cells.

Philip Doganis (NTUA) carried out a demonstration on the SABYDOMA Safety by Process Control approach (SbPC) and its capabilities to bring SSbD to the production stage. SbPC allows manipulation of NM characteristics at the point of production, extending scientific reach from the design phase to the production phase. The detailed physics-based model developed by the NTUA team acts as a digital twin for training purposes and facilitates tuning and testing of the control algorithms.

Moreover, Roland Grafström (Misvik Biology) made a presentation of hazard estimates from high-throughput screening of the materials variants in production within the case studies. Minute differences in outputs of the production protocols supported that the case studies work-up concepts agreed with the consideration of SSbD. 

The workshop ended with an emotional farewell of Andrew Nelson, as the project ends this month, thanking all project partners for their great work and all stakeholders for their contributions, feedback and collaboration during the past four years.

The agenda of the workshop is available here.