A Transformation-First Roadmap for Safe and Sustainable Emerging Advanced Materials

Advanced materials are being engineered at a pace that outstrips our collective ability to anticipate their life-cycle impacts.This mismatch is no longer academic.The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), signaling how modular, porous architectures have become enabling platforms for carbon capture, separations, sensing, and water technologies.1 In parallel, regulators and funders are shifting from "risk management after deployment" to prevention-oriented innovation, expecting credible SSbD evidence early in R&D, not retrofitted late.[2][3][4] The European Commission's Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) Recommendation formalized this direction: chemicals and materials should be designed to provide a function while avoiding harmful properties, and sustainability should be ensured through a life-cycle perspective.3 then, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) framework has evolved through testing rounds (2023-2024) and has been updated again in 2025, reflecting a move toward clearer "SSbD fundamentals" and staged, decision-oriented assessment.2,4 Complementary work has crystallized best practice into roadmaps and operational guidance for advanced materials.5,6 For materials researchers, the implication is simple: functionality alone will not define success.If a material's transformative trajectory 7,8 (air → water/soil → biota → end-oflife) undermines performance or creates new hazards or functional failure, it will face regulatory friction, market rejection, or both.SSbD therefore cannot be an end-stage "tick box"; it must be treated as a design variable, optimized alongside the functional target.This Viewpoint develops a practical SSbD playbook grounded in transformation science�an area where my work across engineered nanomaterial (ENM) dissolution, dopant-controlled release, bio/eco-corona formation, and the environmental transformation and ecotoxicology of MOFs.The central claim is that SSbD becomes actionable when we stop treating materials as static objects and instead treat them as trajectories.Three propositions recur across systems we and others study: (i) early commit-point chemistry can lock in downstream fate; (ii) abiotic stability does not imply biological inertness; and (iii) "safer" solutions are often achieved by controlling where, when, and in what form reactivity is expressed.