Environmental hazard assessment for polymeric and inorganic nanobiomaterials used in drug delivery

Abstract

Background: The increasing development and use of nanobiomaterials raises questions about their potential adverse effects on the environment after excretion and release. Published ecotoxicological data was searched for five polymeric nanobiomaterials [chitosan, polylactic acid (PLA), polyacrylonitrile (PAN), polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), and poly(lactic-glycolic acid) (PLGA)] and one inorganic nanobiomaterial [hydroxyapatite (HAP)] to evaluate the environmental hazards for freshwater and soil using a meta-analysis. If enough data was available, a probabilistic species sensitivity distribution (pSSD) and from this a predicted no effect concentration (PNEC) was calculated. If only one data point was available, a PNEC was calculated based on the most sensitive endpoint. Each material was classified either as "nano" or "non-nano", depending on the categorization in the original articles. When the original article specified that the material consisted of nanoparticles, the material was classified as nano; when nothing was mentioned, the material was classified as "non-nano".

Results: For PLA, PHA and PLGA, no published data on ecotoxicity was found and therefore no hazard assessment could be conducted. In soils, HAP was found to have the lowest PNEC with 0.3 mg/kg, followed by PAN and chitosan. In freshwater, chitosan was found to have the lowest PNEC with 5 µg/l, followed by nano-chitosan, HAP and PAN.

Conclusion: Compared with other common pollutants, even the most sensitive of the selected nanobiomaterials, chitosan, is less toxic than engineered nanomaterials such as nano-ZnO and nano-Ag, some common antibiotics, heavy metals or organic pollutants such as triclosan. Given the current knowledge, the nanobiomaterials covered in this work therefore pose only little or no environmental hazard.

Fig. 1

Summary of size distributions of nano-chitosan and HAP used in freshwater ecotoxicity studies. “NA”: size not reported in the study

Fig. 2

Probabilistic species sensitivity distributions (pSSDs) of chitosan, chitosan nanoparticles, and HAP nanoparticles in freshwater

Fig. 3

Probabilistic species sensitivity distributions (pSSDs) of chitosan and chitosan nanoparticles in freshwater by removing all pathogenic bacteria and fungi in the collected data

Fig. 4

Probabilistic species sensitivity distribution (pSSD) of chitosan in soil

Fig. 5

Cumulative probabilistic species sensitivity distributions (pSSDs) of chitosans and HAP in freshwater. For chitosan, curves are shown for all data and for pathogenic bacteria removed (labelled “env”)

Fig. 6

Predicted no-effect concentrations (PNEC) of nanobiomaterials (NBMs), engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), pharmaceuticals and some pollutants in freshwater. For references see Additional file 1: Table S8