What is the exposome?
Each person encounters a unique combination of environmental exposures over their lifetime.
The cumulative environmental exposures an individual has experienced in their lifetime is known as their ‘exposome’.
It is complex to unpick how these cumulative interactions impact immunity.
The Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence (MRC CoRE) in Exposome Immunology will initially focus on three airborne pollutant factors (diesel, woodfire and smoking) and three common viral infections. This will let us establish a workflow and knowledge base before expanding to other environmental challenges and chronic conditions.
On this page:
What are the major exposome factors?
Environmental exposures, including:
- chemical sources, such as pollutants;
- biological, for example the microbiome and infectious exposure;
- physical, like noise or radiation.
Lifestyle and social exposures, including:
- psychological, such as stress and mental health;
- socioeconomic, for example poverty and wealth;
- lifestyle, like diet and exercise.
Our approach
Helping to identify new treatments and ways to prevent chronic inflammatory diseases.
We investigate how the exposome interacts with the immune system to drive chronic inflammatory diseases like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD).
Understanding these processes will help us to identify new treatments and ways of preventing these diseases.
Some of these pathways may be similar across multiple diseases, meaning that we could potentially use the same intervention to target multiple conditions.
We will combine several approaches in our research pipeline.
Our research pillars
Data Science
By integrating diverse datasets from large human cohort studies and laboratory experiments, we can identify key biological signs of disease and predict the pathways through which exposome factors interact with the immune system in barrier tissues like the lung and gut.
Mechanistic Immunology
We will use cutting-edge approaches including analysing preclinical mouse models, human samples, and lab-based replicas of human tissues to understand in detail how the immune system in barrier tissues responds to various exposome factors, and why this can sometimes lead to disease.
Experimental Medicine
Findings from our data science and mechanistic experiments will be validated in human clinical studies. This will help bring new treatments to the clinic and will also generate new datasets to be fed back into our data models.
About us
Who we are
Find out more about our management team and see a list of people in our Centre.
