The exposome in practice: Design of the EXPOsOMICS project

Abstract

EXPOsOMICS is a European Union funded project that aims to develop a novel approach to the assessment of exposure to high priority environmental pollutants, by characterizing the external and the internal components of the exposome. It focuses on air and water contaminants during critical periods of life. To this end, the project centres on 1) exposure assessment at the personal and population levels within existing European short and long-term population studies, exploiting available tools and methods which have been developed for personal exposure monitoring (PEM); and 2) multiple “omic” technologies for the analysis of biological samples (internal markers of external exposures). The search for the relationships between external exposures and global profiles of molecular features in the same individuals constitutes a novel advancement 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).

Traffic-Related Air Pollution and Childhood Asthma: Recent Advances and Remaining Gaps in the Exposure Assessment Methods

“…The literature, however, suggests that there has been a recent move from studying standard air pollutants to studying other agents, most notably including black and elemental carbon, two agents that are considered as TRAP signatures, but also PM composition elements and other properties such as oxidative potential [31,48,75]. As it stands, there were no studies investigating the impacts of long-term exposure to ultra-fine particles on asthma but there are studies under way to measure ultra-fine particles [89]. The work on PM composition is particularly relevant with the expected wide-spread introduction of electric vehicles and the associated likely reductions of exhaust emissions and increase in non-exhaust emissions [90].…”

Oxidative Stress and Inflammation Induced by Environmental and Psychological Stressors: A Biomarker Perspective

“…While there is considerable activity in molecular epidemiological analysis to characterise biological samples archived in biobanks, the validation and mechanistic understanding that accompanies these largely correlative analyses is both complementary and vital; tying together evidence from multiple levels of analysis is required to corroborate the correlative analyses that are conducted on these omics readouts (124,159). For example, while many of the ongoing exposome studies include aspects concerning air pollutants, validation of these studies requires a coherent molecular context, while conversely targeted analyses need to be were previously uncharacterised (172).…”

The need for strategic development of safety sciences

“…Simply said, a pathway perturbation, which is visible in several technologies, strongly corroborates a biologically meaningful pattern. The respective approaches developed in the Human Toxome Project are currently being published (Fasani et al, 2016;Rosenberg et al, unpublished (Vrijheid et al, 2014), EXPOsOM-ICS 23 (Callaway, 2012;Vineis et al, 2016) (Stephens et al, 2016) and collaborating in EBTC, these approaches are gaining traction as a new paradigm of how to handle existing data in safety assessments. Noteworthy, EBT approaches cross-fertilize with the various quality assurance approaches: only evidence of high-quality sources can be used (requiring quality scoring (Samuel et al, 2016)) and this teaches the scientific community how to produce and report properly, as discussed recently for in vitro work (Pamies and Hartung, 2016).…”