Comment on Shvedova et al. (2016), “gender differences in murine pulmonary responses elicited by cellulose nanocrystals”

Jo Anne Shatkin, Günter Oberdörster

A recent publication in "Particle and Fibre Toxicology" reported on the gender differences in pulmonary toxicity from oro-pharyngeal aspiration of a high dose of cellulose nanocrystals. The study is timely given the growing interest in diverse commercial applications of cellulose nanomaterials, and the need for studies addressing pulmonary toxicity. The results from this study are interesting and can be strengthened with a discussion of how differences in the weights of female and male C57BL/6 mice was accounted for. Without such a discussion, the observed differences could be partially explained by the lower body weights of females, resulting in higher doses than males when standardized to body weight or lung volume. Further, few conclusions can be drawn about the pulmonary toxicity of cellulose nanocrystals given the study design: examination of a single high dose of cellulose nanocrystals, administered as a bolus, without positive or negative controls or low dose comparisons, and at an unphysiological and high dose rate. Simulating the bolus type delivery by inhalation would require a highly unrealistic exposure concentration in the g/m(3) range of extremely short duration. A discussion of these limitations is missing in the paper; further speculative comparisons of cellulose nanocrystals toxicity to asbestos and carbon nanotubes in the abstract are both unwarranted and can be misleading, these materials were neither mentioned in the manuscript, nor evaluated in the study.