Exposure Science and the Exposome
We can’t (easily) change our genes, but if we are serious about the prevention of diseases, we need to know the modifiable part – that is, the environmental factors.
Our environmental exposures affect our health over a lifetime. The exposome is a new science to understand which chemicals, occupational and social exposures, or combination of bacteria in our gut, are beneficial or detrimental to our health, and how we can prevent them. Researchers in Utrecht are starting to systematically sequence the environmental factors influencing our health – mapping out the outside world as well as the miniature worlds existing, for instance, in our intestinal tracts.
Research projects
Exposome-NL
Exposome-NL is a Dutch consortium of internationally renowned scientists from exposure science, environmental sciences, cardiovascular and metabolic health, clinical epidemiology, nutritional epidemiology, geosciences, agent-based modelling, molecular biology, chemistry, and bio-informatics and biostatistics. Together the scientists from different Dutch universities and medical centres focus on the exposome.
Duration: 2020 - 2030
Coordinator: Roel Vermeulen
Funded by: NWO Gravitation Programme
EXPANSE
EXPANSE is a five-year European research project that focuses on the urban exposome and involves 20 academic and non-academic partners located in 14 European countries and the USA. EXPANSE is one of the nine projects that form the European Human Exposome Network.
Duration: 2020 - 2025
Coordinators: Jelle Vlaanderen, Roel Vermeulen
Funded by: European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
EPHOR
In the EPHOR project researchers will lay the groundwork for evidence-based and cost-effective prevention for improving health at work, by developing a working life exposome toolbox. This consortium consists of 19 exposure, health, and data technology scientists and technology partners from 12 different countries.
Duration: 2020 - 2025
Contact: Susan Peters
Funded by: European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
Air View Car
The AIr View Car maps the air quality in a city at street level. Utrecht University has fitted two cars with special measurement equipment: sensors that measure nitrogen dioxide, particulates, ultra-fine particulates and soot. The data will be shared with residents, so that everyone can see where the air is the cleanest and where the pollution is the worst.
Duration: 2017 - ongoing
Contact: Jules Kerckhoffs
GERoNiMO - Generalized EMF Research using Novel Methods
The GERoNiMO project aims to close gaps of knowledge on health effects of lectromagnetic fields (EMF) and reduce exposure. To achieve this, it will use an integrated approach, bringing together researchers from different disciplines (biology, engineering and physics, epidemiology and public health, radiation protection and risk assessment and communication), 19 different research institutions (see below) and 13 countries to address key questions related to EMF.
Duration: 2014 - ongoing
Contact: Anke Huss & Roel Vermeulen
The Xuanwei Lung Cancer Project
Smoky coal is a late Permian bituminous coal and its constitutional make up and relationship to lung cancer forms the backbone of the Xuanwei Lung Cancer Project. Through this project we will be able to inform not only local communities about their lung cancer risk, but also the wider coal and solid fuel using communities about hazardous fuel constituents and potential hazard mitigation strategies.
Contact: George Downward
Exposome-Scan
What is the influence of non-genetic factors on our health, such as lifestyle, diet and exposure to harmful substances? The Exposome-Scan project, led by Leiden professor Thomas Hankemeier and Utrecht professor Roel Vermeulen, has been awarded 3.2 million euros from the NWO Investment Grant Large programme, to answer this question. With the grant, researchers from various Dutch institutes and medical centres will build a unique and large-scale open facility for research into the so-called exposome.
Duration: 2021 - ongoing
Coordinator: Roel Vermeulen
Funded by: NWO
P4O2
Many patients who have had COVID-19 continue to have health complaints for a long period of time. The long-term effects of the damage caused by the virus and the body's response to it is unclear. The Dutch consortium Precision Medicine for more Oxygen (P4O2), which consists of a team of researchers, private parties and patient representatives, will investigate how these complaints develop and which factors can predict them in future patients.
Duration: 2020 -
Project member: Roel Vermeulen
Co-funded by: Health~Holland, Top Sector Life Sciences & Health.
LONGITOOLS
LongITools is a European research project studying the interactions between the environment, lifestyle and health in determining the risks of chronic cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. The project is coordinated by the Centre for Life-Course Health Research at the University of Oulu in Finland.
Duration: 2020 -2025
Project member: Roel Vermeulen
Funded by: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 874739
AI lab Living Environment
At the AI Labs, Utrecht University collaborates with public and private organisations as well as other knowledge institutions on societal issues pertaining to AI and data science. On 22 March the AI lab Living Environment was launched.
Duration: ongoing
Coordinators: Roel Vermeulen, Jelle Vlaanderen, Hanneke Posthumus
Funded by: Utrecht University
PARC
The European Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC), was launched in Paris, France, seeking to develop next-generation chemical risk assessment, incorporating both human health and the environment in a "One Health" approach. It will help support the European Union's Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability and the European Green Deal's "zero pollution" ambition.
Duration: 2022 – 2027
Contact: Jelle Vlaanderen
Funding by: European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101057014.
HYPERMARKER
HYPERMARKER will unleash the potential of pharmacometabolomics to provide a ‘smart’ prescription of antihypertensive therapy. Well-phenotyped cohorts from eleven European countries will provide metabolomic profiles and blood samples for pharmacometabolomic assessments to identify predictors of treatment response in hypertension using advanced AI and deep learning methods. Prediction models for individual treatment responses to antihypertensive medication will be clinically validated and refined through an innovative RCT across 4 sites in Europe.
Duration: 2023 - 2026
Co-ordinator: Jelle Vlaanderen
Funded by: European Commission
AMIGO - Occupational and Environmental Health Prospective Cohort Study in the Netherlands
Part of Lifework and as such one of the main contributors to COSMOS, AMIGO aims to longitudinally study occupational and environmental determinants of diseases and well-being from a multidisciplinary and life course point of view. The major assets of AMIGO are its detailed occupational and environmental determinants in combination with the unique longitudinal health data registered in general practice besides the more usual linkages to routine cancer and mortality registries and self-reported health, including health effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields.
Duration: 2011 - to date
Contact: Roel Vermeulen and Anke Huss
AGRICOH - Investigating exposure to pesticides and the risk of female breast cancer in an international consortium of agricultural cohorts
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the Netherlands and worldwide. Although endocrine disrupting properties and genotoxic effects have been implicated in various
pesticides and speculated to modify breast cancer risks, few epidemiological studies have addressed this research question. The proposed analysis of three large cohort studies (USA, France and Norway)
will be the largest analysis to date of breast cancer risk from specific pesticides. Findings will provide a scientific evidence base for regulatory changes to prevent carcinogenic exposure among farmers as well as the general public of the Netherlands and other populations where pesticide use is common.Duration: 1 July 2022 – 30 June 2025
Contact: Hans Kromhout
Funded by: KWF Dutch Cancer Society
UBD Policy
The Urban Burden of Disease Estimation For Policy Making (UBD Policy) project aims to improve the estimation of health impacts and socioeconomic costs and/or benefits of environmental stressors, advance methodological approaches and foster their acceptance as common good practice for urban areas, to help strengthen evidence-based policy making at city, national and EU level.
Duration: 2023-2026
IRAS project team: Gerard Hoek, Roel Vermeulen, Ulrike Gehring, Xuan Chen
Funded by: Horizon Europe’s 2022 Research and Innovation Program
RISK-HUNT3R
RISK-HUNT3R is to develop a new modular framework for animal-free next generation risk assessment (NGRA). The RISK-HUNT3R vision is to combine human exposure scenarios, in vitro hazard assessment, and NAM-based toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic testing, followed by integrative risk assessment via computational approaches and decision-making based on weight of evidence.
Duration: 2021-2026
Coordinators: Roel Vermeulen, Jelle Vlaanderen
Funded by: European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme
Cohort studies
COSMOS - Cohort Study of Mobile Phone Use and Health
COSMOS is a large prospective cohort study of mobile telephone users (ongoing recruitment of 250,000 men and women aged 18+ years in five European countries - Denmark, Finland, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK) who will be followed up for 25+ years. Information on mobile telephone use is collected prospectively through questionnaires and objective traffic data from network operators. Associations with disease risks will be studied.
Duration: ongoing
Contact: Roel Vermeulen
The PIAMA birth cohort study
The PIAMA-study is a large ongoing population-based birth cohort study with prenatal inclusion and follow-up until the current age of 23/24 years. The study was designed to investigate the influence of lifestyle and environment on the development of asthma, allergy and lung function.
Duration: 1995 - ongoing
Contact: Ulrike Gehring
LIFEWORK - Investigating the health risks of multiple environmental and occupational exposures
The prospective LIFEWORK cohort was established to collect a large amount of high quality data on occupational and environmental exposures using a harmonized core questionnaire. The study focuses on the impact of physical, biological and chemical exposures in our daily living environment: at home and at work.
Duration: 2011 - ongoing
Contact: Roel Vermeulen
Education
MOOC on the exposome
Utrecht University added a new member to the MOOC family: The Exposome - cracking the science about what makes us sick. In this course several researchers will introduce you to the exposome concept; the non-genetic drivers of health and disease, since our genes alone do not determine our fate. Join us and sign up!
Master: Health and Environment
Health and environment are undeniably strongly related. Global trends, such as climate change, chemical pollution, biodiversity loss, urbanisation and deforestation pose grand challenges to society as a whole. What these challenges have in common is that they are serious threats to human, veterinary, wildlife, and ecosystem health. Are you ready to address these global challenges in this interdisciplinary Master’s programme?