European Observatory for Nanomaterials

EU report maps nanomedicine terminology in the regulatory landscape

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has identified and collected frequently used terms in the field of nanomedicine to map the currently used terminology of regulatory scientists coming from different geographic areas. The outcome of their analysis supports the development of harmonised use of terminology in the future.

Helsinki, 21 August 2018 – According to the report, the Nanomedicines Working Group of the International Pharmaceutical Regulators Forum (IPRF) has previously prioritised the need to map, compile and discuss the currently used nanomedicines terminology of regulatory scientists coming from different geographical areas.

JRC took the lead in identifying and compiling frequently used terms in the field by the use of web crawling and text mining tools as well as the manual extraction of terms. As a result, the websites of 13 regulatory authorities and clinical trial registries globally involved in regulating nanomedicines were crawled.

The report found sectorial and geographical differences in the frequency and type of nanomedicine-related terms used in a regulatory context. JRC compiled 31 relevant and most frequently used terms deriving from various agencies and analysed their similarities and differences. The resulting analysis supports the need to develop a harmonised approach to the use of terminology in the future.