Exposomics Reveals the Environment’s Impact on Our Health

Our exposome is the sum of all environmental exposures we encounter over our lifetime. These are all individual encounters influenced by air and water quality, our diet and the pharmaceuticals or personal care products we use. Unlike the genome, which is fixed, predictive and well-mapped, the exposome is much more dynamic and continues to be largely unknown.

The field of exposomics is promising because it offers insight into how external factors contribute to individual and population health outcomes by revealing exposure patterns. It could also inform local public health initiatives and address regional disparities. 

One major challenge in exposomics research is that many of these individual exposures can occur at extremely low levels and significantly impact health in some populations but not as much in others. For example, differences in diet could impact how people living in the same neighborhood are affected by the air quality.

Researchers must also account for a wide dynamic range from low- to high-level exposures and track large families of compounds, like PFAS, which are evolving as chemicals are slightly altered to avoid regulations.

As the number of compounds we’re studying continues to increase and we have to consider individual sensitivity, assessing the full health impact becomes increasingly complex. The broader research community will have to come together to fully understand what’s happening.

Exposomics is still a relatively new field, with the study only beginning to gain mainstream prominence in the last two decades. Our research community is still building our understanding of all the potential exposures and how they may impact human health to see where research efforts should go. For example, we’re seeing increasingly high cancer rates in younger populations across the United States. Why is that? Many hypothesize that it’s due to exposures from the environment, processed food, and mainly, our interaction with chemical compounds like PFAS, which are everywhere today, from food and the environment to other consumer products and packaging.

Women’s health is an area I’m particularly interested in because we are seeing increases in breast cancer, and we need to figure out how the environment plays a role. Unlike the genome, where we can be more predictive, there’s a lot more differentiation in exposomics that needs understanding, and we’re at the precipice of that with this field gaining more steam from technology advances and overall awareness.  

Recent advancements in MS are significantly improving researchers’ ability to detect and quantify known and emerging contaminants with high accuracy and sensitivity.

High-resolution accurate mass spectrometers  allow scientists to identify compounds present in complex samples (known or unknown), which is essential in exposomics research as our understanding of how different compounds affect human health continues to evolve. These instruments are capable of performing both quantitation and discovery simultaneously, which is all the more important when supporting targeted analysis or achieving other breakthrough discoveries. Our Orbitrap Astral mass spectrometer, for example, has dual detectors that allow researchers to combine sensitivity and speed to uncover the potential biological impact of these many different exposures.  

Identifying unknown compounds is another key challenge in exposomics. This is where MS shines, because researchers have to do it analytically in the absence of libraries. We have to use the whole analytical toolbox to conduct this research, and MS, in particular, provides the most robust and sensitive analysis when studying different molecules, for example.

One important approach made possible by MS involves using alternative fragmentation techniques to break apart molecules in many different ways, giving scientists a richer dataset to interpret.