Decoding the exposome: How analytical technologies are uncovering the next steps in environmental discovery
Susan Bird, senior manager, Metabolomics Vertical Marketing at Thermo Fisher Scientific
For the last several decades, scientists from around the world have been trying to answer a deceptively simple question: how does the world around us, our unique environment, shape overall human health? Genetics, of course, alongside proteomics, metabolomics and more play an important role in long-term health outcomes, but those are all individual pieces to the incomplete puzzle.
What’s been missing is how environmental exposures from the air we breathe to the food we eat play a role in completing the puzzle. This totality of environmental influences on health is known as the exposome, and the study of this has created the rapidly growing field of exposomics.
Exposomics not only examines the impact of today’s exposures, but the full arc of exposures from birth onward. While the field has been around for more than 20 years, recent scientific and regulatory momentum from the European Human Exposome Network, the International Human Exposome Network and ongoing U.S. efforts through the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences have united researchers in building methodologies needed to decode this environmental puzzle.
Today, new studies in exposomics are beginning to answer crucial questions about contaminants like pesticides or forever chemicals, chronic disease onset and long-term human health in ways that were simply not possible even a decade ago.
Why exposomics is rising now
The growing interest in exposomics is far from accidental or surprising. It mirrors rising concern about the impact that environmental contamination and pollution have on global health. New global regulations from food and environmental agencies, as well as increased awareness of forever chemicals such as PFAS, are pushing the scientific community to better understand what all of this means for public health.
There are innumerable contaminants that we all encounter every day, which illustrates the scale of this challenge. Some examples of these unexpected exposures include the improper disposal of unused prescription drugs which can introduce pharmaceuticals into water systems. Beyond our water systems, studies are finding PFAS compounds from consumer products like nonstick cookware that are accumulating over time in soil, water and eventually the human body. Standard tests were never designed to identify which of the thousands of potential chemicals that we encounter in the environment are biologically meaningful and affect health outcomes.
Researchers studying exposomics are now connecting long-term exposure to serious health conditions, such as cancer, neurological disorders and metabolic diseases. In addition to air pollution, microplastics, dietary compounds and emerging classes of pharmaceutical ingredients from emerging drugs like GLP-1s for weight loss or common over the counter medications like Advil could be all effecting the environment.
A Need for analytical science to understand exposomics
As headlines about environmental health hazards become more commonplace, the pressure to quantify and understand the exposure of what it truly means for human health grows. This is where analytical science and technology become indispensable.
The human exposome is uniquely vast, complex and constantly changing for everyone. Equipment available for researchers has become far more sensitive and has led to breakthroughs in the identification and analysis of these exposures.
Advances across chromatography and mass spectrometry-based systems have dramatically expanded what scientific researchers can detect, quantify and characterize. Rather than targeted screening for a short list of known compounds, modern workflows can track unknown compounds, where targeted screening could only uncover what has already been deemed important to monitor. Having the ability to pair targeted analysis for specific contaminants with untargeted analysis for contaminants that are not yet known is allowing exposomics to move from the theoretical concept it may have been 20 years to one of the most important disciplines today.
Targeted- and non-targeted workflows have become table stakes for studying how persistent pollutants and containments may linger for decades and accumulate long before it causes any measurable harm to health.
Meaningful shifts are also happening in how researchers process and analyze this data. AI and automation are streamlining the sorting and interpretation of large, complex datasets and helping scientists more quickly identify patterns or unusual trends that demand a closer look.
Where Exposomics Goes Next
The regulatory environment around exposomics continues to evolve and the policies from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S. are continuing to revise their contaminant lists as new data illustrates the need to expand regulations for new compounds. Researchers will have to keep pace by developing and adopting even more sensitive methods and standardize approaches that can be scaled across institutions.
Exposomics makes it clear that environmental exposures have a significant impact on human health, and we must continue to work to safeguard public health with precise and proactive scientific research. Every technological advance and breakthrough is helping lay the foundation for a more complete and accurate view of how environmental discoveries can support cleaner, safer and healthier communities and populations in the future.
