The NANOCAN project aims to enhance our understanding of the behavior of nanomaterials in the body, focusing on biodegradable nanoparticles for cancer diagnostics, and targeted cancer drug delivery. There is a range of available and potentially useful nanoparticles and drugs that might be of interest to such a project. In this paper, we make values implied in—and relevant to—choices between these alternatives explicit, thereby offering a case study of how values enter research processes in this area. From a project centered perspective, we observe that values often play their role implicitly, as a result of funding incentives, regulations, and structural and organizational features of the research process. Based on our observations and categorization of relevant values, we turn to a broader discussion of how responsible research and innovation can be facilitated by making value priorities, value conflicts, and biases explicit targets of normative assessment.