PROCESS OF DEVELOPING THE ROADMAP

NIOSH released its draft Roadmap document Asbestos and Other Mineral Fibers: A Roadmap for Scientific Research in February 2007 and posted it on the public docket. In May 2007, NIOSH held a public meeting on the Roadmap at which a number of presentations were made on proposed changes to the document (NIOSH, 2009b). The Roadmap was also submitted to a panel of expert reviewers. The draft document was revised in response to reviewer comments and was released in June 2008 (NIOSH, 2009c). The June version was further revised in response to public review. Table 2-1 summarizes this timeline. The January 2009 version entitled Revised Draft NIOSH Current Intelligence Bulletin. As bestos Fibers and Other Elongated Mineral Particles: State of the Sci ence and Roadmap for Research (NIOSH, 2009a) is the version that was reviewed by this committee and is referred to throughout this report as “the Roadmap.”

TABLE 2-1

NIOSH Roadmap Timeline.

The committee recognizes the considerable effort and expertise that went into developing the Roadmap. Further, NIOSH has sought input from a number of stakeholders and expert peer reviewers. The process has been open and iterative and has provided several opportunities for comments by interested parties.

The challenge in developing and implementing the research program outlined in the Roadmap lies in the interagency and interdisciplinary nature of the research questions. Because NIOSH is not the only federal agency involved in efforts on asbestos and numerous stakeholders are interested in these issues, implementation of the Roadmap will involve many other entities. Having wider authorship of the Roadmap beyond NIOSH would have been challenging. Another possibility might have been to have had an external independent organization develop the Roadmap as was done for the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) research strategy on airborne particulate matter, a congressionally mandated effort that is discussed below (NRC, 1998). Having said this, the committee believes that the multiple opportunities to comment on the Roadmap have engaged a wide range of stakeholders and the important work ahead to implement the Roadmap will have to involve the relevant federal agencies, organizations, associations, and interested parties.

A BROADER RESEARCH STRATEGY

A roadmap is defined as “a detailed plan to guide progress toward a goal” (Merriam-Webster, 2009). The NIOSH Roadmap comports with this definition and takes an important step toward articulating a research agenda for examining the potential toxicities of all elongate mineral particles. In thinking about the key components of a roadmap, the committee first considered the broader picture of how a research agenda is implemented and then examined other examples of research strategies and the ways in which these strategies incorporate a research roadmap (NRC, 1998, 2007, 2009).

In 1998 the National Research Council produced Research Priorities for Airborne Particulate Matter (NRC, 1998). This report (along with three subsequent companion reports) presented a policy-relevant research strategy for addressing uncertainties surrounding the setting of the national ambient air quality standards for particulate matter. The report presented a conceptual framework for an integrated national program of particulate matter research, identified the most important research priorities, and described the recommended short-term and long-term timing and estimated costs of such research in an integrated strategy (NRC, 1998). This series of reports had substantial positive impact on EPA’s long-term research planning, the coordinated implementation of intramural and extramural research efforts to address knowledge gaps, and congressional funding for the particulate matter research program.

In 2007 the NRC report A Review of the Ocean Research Priorities Plan and Implementation Strategy reviewed a plan that established the first coordinated national interagency research planning effort to support ocean science. The NRC report was supportive of the research plan but found that it lacked some important elements including a vision for ocean research in the next decade, a ranking of either long-term or near-term priorities, a discussion of the level of needed funding, an implementation strategy, and metrics by which the plan would be evaluated.

The NRC conducted a review of the federal strategy for environmental, health, and safety research on nanotechnology and outlined the following important elements of a research strategy in its report, Review of the Federal Strategy for Nanotechnology-Related Environmental, Health, and Safety Research (NRC, 2009):

• Vision, or statement of purpose. What is the ultimate purpose ofconducting the research?
• Goals. What specific research goals should be achieved?
• Evaluation of the state of science.
• Roadmap. What is the plan of action to achieve the stated goals?What are the specific objectives, and when do they need to be achieved? How will other efforts and initiatives be leveraged, in cluding industry and international initiatives? How will the roadmap be adjusted in light of new knowledge? What is the time required for the plan to become effective?
• Evaluation. How will progress be measured, and who will be responsible for measuring it? Are there measurable milestones that can be evaluated against a clear timeline?
• Review. How will the strategy be revised in light of new findings, to ensure that it remains responsive to the overarching vision and goals?
• Resources. Are there sufficient resources to achieve the statedgoals? If not, what are the plans to obtain new resources or to leverage other initiatives to achieve the goals?
• Mechanisms. What are the most effective approaches to achieving the stated goals? How will exploratory and targeted research be used? What will the balance be between principal investigator-driven and goal-driven research and between intramural and extramural research programs? How will research efforts be coordinated to ensure a coherent approach to achieving the stated goals? What provisions are there for enabling interdisciplinary research that crosses established funding and agency boundaries?
• Accountability. How will stakeholders participate in the processof developing and evaluating a research strategy? Who will be accountable for progress toward stated goals? Who will be responsible for disseminating information generated within the research strategy and ensuring its use in raising awareness and making decisions?

As outlined above, the NIOSH Roadmap is one part of a larger research strategy. The committee urges NIOSH to consider working with other agencies and organizations to develop a strategy to ensure that the Roadmap will move forward with adequate funding and accountability.

The current Roadmap suggests that the next steps will involve parsing out the activities to five independent study groups. Although this is a common approach, the committee believes that the nature of the issues requires combined attention from all disciplines. Sampling and characterization issues should be the concern of toxicologists and epidemiologists as well as mineralogists. Toxicology, epidemiology, and risk assessment overlap in interests and goals. Moving away from discipline-specific review groups would go a long way toward achieving the integrated understanding that is necessary. The committee urges considera tion of an interdisciplinary and comprehensive research strategy to ensure the implementation of this research (Chapter 4).

KEY COMPONENTS OF THE NIOSH ROADMAP

The focus of this report is on one part of the research strategy—the research roadmap. In drawing from the examples above and the committee’s expertise with similar documents, the committee has concluded that the NIOSH Roadmap needs to be strengthened to clearly address the following key components:

• Overarching vision
• Rationale for the endeavor—in this case, the public and occupational health rationale
• Research goals
• Research framework—the systematic plan for conducting the research

Each of these components is discussed below in terms of how it is currently presented and how it could be improved in the Roadmap.

Goals

The NIOSH Roadmap clearly describes the research program’s goals (Box 2-1). However, the goals are presented as independent “silos” of effort to address toxicology, mineralogy, epidemiology, and analytical methods separately, rather than emphasizing the interdependent, interdisciplinary nature of this research. Greater integration of the goals across disciplines is necessary to ensure that the research results can be drawn together and to foster the needed collaboration among scientists and across agencies. Further, the goals have to be structured so as to drive the research program. The current goals are written broadly. An effort is needed to make the goals more focused and explicit so that they inform the systematic exploration of the potential toxicity of various types of elongate mineral particles related to specific physical, chemical, and surface properties and other factors that might affect human health.

BOX 2-1

NIOSH Roadmap’s Strategic Research Goals and Objectives. NIOSH Current Intelligence Bulletin. Asbestos Fibers and Other Elongated Mineral Particles: State of the Science and Roadmap for Research (NIOSH, 2009a)

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