<\/p>\n
GenV will follow babies and their parents to help tackle problems like asthma, obesity, and mental illness. (Pixabay)<\/p>\n
The aim of the research is to understand what shapes health and wellbeing across our early years and mid-life, and to identify factors that contribute to the development of disease.<\/p>\n
“We’re interested in long-term [health] outcomes \u2026 things like cancer, heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s,” Professor Wake says.<\/p>\n
“But also things that children experience now \u2014 like poor mental health, asthma, ADHD, autism and obesity.”<\/p>\n
While other large studies have set out <\/strong>to answer similar questions, Professor Wake says <\/strong>technological advances mean researchers are now able to capture health data in more detail at vastly bigger scales.<\/p>\n “The idea is to work with people across an entire population, try and measure all of the layers that we know are important to health, and then learn how we can actually improve [disease] prevention pathways.”<\/p>\n To do this, researchers will capture information about participants’ DNA, as well as the physical, chemical, psychological and social conditions they’re exposed to \u2014 known collectively as the human “exposome”.<\/p>\n What is the exposome?<\/p>\n The exposome is a measure of all the environmental or external exposures we face over our lifetime and the ways in which these impact our health.<\/p>\n It includes everything from diet, lifestyle, education and income to air pollution, chemical exposures, and climate conditions.<\/p>\n “Many of [these factors] overlap and happen in unequal ways, so if you’re born and grow up in a poor area, your exposome is likely to be shaped by external stressors, air pollution, fewer opportunities and less income,” Professor Wake says.<\/p>\n It also encompasses internal processes, such as your microbiome (or gut bacteria), inflammatory processes and metabolic factors, that are shaped, at least in part, by external exposures.<\/p>\n Johns Hopkins University researcher Fenna Sill\u00e9 says while almost all diseases have a genetic component, the exposome often plays a critical role, particularly in the development of chronic diseases<\/a>.<\/p>\n “It’s estimated that up to 70 per cent \u2014 and for some [chronic] diseases even 90 per cent \u2014 of the risk is due to environmental exposures,” Dr Sill\u00e9 told the Health Report<\/a>.<\/p>\n Loading…<\/p>\n In May, a group of international researchers, including Dr Sill\u00e9, convened in the US to establish the Human Exposome Project \u2014 a global effort to “systematically map the totality of environmental exposures and their effects on human biology”<\/a>.<\/p>\n “The idea has lived for a while now of starting something that complements the Human Genome Project, but it’s obviously not a small feat,” she says.<\/p>\n “If the genome is your biological blueprint, the exposome is the lifelong record of how the world interacts with that blueprint.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The field of exposomics research has grown in recent years, particularly in Europe<\/a>, where researchers have been investigating the relationship between environmental exposures and conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, type 1 diabetes, coeliac disease, allergies and asthma.<\/p>\n While studying how environmental factors influence human health is not a novel idea, advancements in AI and computational models mean scientists can “really start to deal with” the complexity of overlapping and interacting exposures, University of Queensland epidemiologist and toxicologist Nick Osborne says.<\/p>\n “In the past, we’d look at one toxin \u2026 and we’d see what the effect was. But, of course, that’s not the real world,” says Dr Osborne.<\/p>\n “In the real world \u2026 there are a lot of [exposures] happening at once.<\/p>\n “[The exposome] is about having an understanding that the body is a very complex system but it’s also interfacing with a very complex environment.”<\/p>\n Exposome research could shed light on cancer questions<\/p>\n In Australia and other high-income countries, dramatic increases in cancer rates among young people in recent years have prompted concern<\/a> that widespread environmental changes are contributing to earlier diagnoses.<\/p>\n Research suggests a surge in obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and increased exposure to plastics may all be playing a role, as well as changes to young people’s gut bacteria from eating ultra-processed food and using more antibiotics.<\/p>\n