In the News: Integrating exposomics into biomedicine
A new paper in the journal Science highlights the importance of integrating exposomics into mainstream biomedical research.
Peng Gao, Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Exposomics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, contributed to the paper as a member of the December 2023 Banbury Conference consortium on Integrating Exposomics into the Biomedical Enterprise.
“Only a fraction of chronic diseases can be primarily attributed to genetic factors alone, highlighting the critical need to understand environmental influences through the exposomics approach,” says Dr. Gao. “In this paper, we elaborate that humans are exposed to multiple dynamic factors throughout their lives, yet research methods and regulatory agencies haven’t kept pace with this complexity, continuing to rely on a ‘one exposure at a time’ mindset.”
Exposomics is an emerging field that aims to understand the comprehensive record of an individual’s environmental exposures throughout their lifetime.
These findings could lead to improved methods for identifying environmental drivers of diseases, new approaches for monitoring individual exposures over lifetimes, evidence-based recommendations for reducing harmful exposures in vulnerable populations, and data-driven policies for environmental health.
