EXPOsOMICS

Duration

2012-2016

Coordinator

Paolo Vineis (Imperial College, London)

Funded by

European Comission

This project aims to predict individual disease risk related to the environment, by characterizing the external and internal exposome for common exposures (air and drinking water contaminants) during critical periods of life, including in utero.

Although environmental (i.e. non-genetic) exposures account for the majority of diseases currently there is no standard or systematic way to measure the influence of environmental exposures on health. This project will move the field forward by developing a personal exposure monitoring (PEM) system (including sensors, smartphones, geo-referencing, satellites) and collect data on individual external exposome as well as analysing biological samples (internal markers of external exposures) using multiple “omic” technologies. The search for the relationships between external exposures (as measured by PEM, which has not previously been used in large scale studies) and global profiles of molecular features (as measured by omics) in the same individuals constitutes a novel advance towards the development of "next generation exposure assessment" for environmental chemicals and their mixtures. The linkage with disease risks opens the way to what are defined here as ‘exposome-wide association studies’ (EWAS).

The ultimate goal is to use the new tools in risk assessment and in the estimation of the burden of environmental disease.