Human Exposome Project
Tina Woods is a champion for the Human Exposome Project, and shapes her focus in her roles as Executive Director of the International Institute of Longevity and as Healthy Longevity Champion for the National Innovation Centre for Ageing and the City of Longevity initiative.
Recent research confirms the relatively minor role that genetics plays in our health, with the ‘exposome’, defined as the totality of exposures individuals experience over their lives affecting their health, responsible for 10 times more variation in mortality risk than genetic predisposition.
A paper published in Nature Medicine, ‘Cities, communities and clinics can be testbeds for human exposome and aging research’, sets out ways to start measuring how humans are affected by the exposome and furnish long-overdue evidence to design environments that enhance healthy life expectancy while reducing health and wellbeing inequalities.
The publication of the paper coincides with a tipping point for an international movement behind the ‘Human Exposome Project’, a generation on from the Human Genome Project, to understand how external exposures (including social, behavioural and geo-physical factors) and their interaction with internal factors (such as genetics and physiology), affect an individual’s health and overall resilience.
Specific environmental factors can activate pathological pathways that contribute to disease and accelerate aging. The ability to capture, analyse and link individual data outside the medical record can show how external exposures affect a person’s health across their lifetime. These interactions can now be much better understood at an individual level and traced with unprecedented precision using artificial intelligence, representing a significant leap forward in determining the impact of the exposome at an aggregated, population health level.
This work is crucial to define new ways to address the chronic disease epidemic and ageing demographic now creating an economic drag in many nations around the world. The evidence will shape more effective public health interventions urgently needed to shift investment and policy away from an unsustainable healthcare model to one more rooted in prevention.
The Exposome Moonshot Forum is meeting for the first time in Washington DC 12-15 May 2025 to launch an unprecedented international scientific endeavour to map the combined impact of environmental factors that impact human health from conception to death. Tina Woods sits on the exposome steering committee. and will bring in her experience and networks from her role as team leader for the Human Exposome Project future XPRIZE moonshot pitched in October 2024.
It’s time for bold, radical change. To improve health outcomes we need to tackle complex interacting drivers of health and disease, including lifestyle, socioeconomic factors and cumulative exposures to physical and social environments. We need understand environmental factors encompassed in the exposome n terms of helping humans not only to survive but to have the resilience to adapt to stress and to thrive in their ‘real world’.
We need a new health investment paradigm, moving from ‘biotech 2.0’ model that funds molecules and drugs targeting individual diseases, to ‘health 3.0’ framework that invests in portfolio for heath creation, bringing ‘Health’ into ESG investment. We need the next generation Human Genome 2.0 project- the Human Exposome 3.0 mission