ABSTRACT
Recently, nanomaterials have been widely adopted in every industry due to their unique and useful physical and chemical functionalities. Nanoparticles mediate toxicity through the production of ROS, thus causing oxidative stress, inflammation, DNA damage, cell death, organelle dysfunction, and death. Currently, our knowledge about nanomaterial toxicity to animals and the environment is highly limited and there exist serious concerns regarding the safe usage of nanomaterials. Biased approaches among laboratories, individual examiners, and agencies also complicate the quality of toxicity data. Moreover, without having proper rules and regulations, there is an urgent need for improving the toxicity evaluation system in a high throughput, systemic way. Today's toxicological evaluations are predominantly through in vitro two dimensional cellular approaches to measure oxidative stress, inflammatory changes, morphological variations, malignant transformation, and DNA damage and mutation. Still, we need to evaluate in a holistic way using the in vitro system itself, and in this regard there are new developments from stem cell usage to single cell assays in high throughput platforms. This chapter summarizes the overview of existing in vitro techniques and the recent developments and their advantages utilizing three-dimensional cellular microarchitecture based toxicity assays. By utilizing the in silico knowledge along with in vitro-ex vivo animalized systems, it is possible to avoid the existing issues unique to in vitro system and enhance the throughput to the desired level.
