Cutting edge science

A holistic concept of exposome requires a shift from addressing the individual determinants of health (as common today) to the interdisciplinary assessment of a wide range of factors together with the individual’s ability to cope with various stressors. In order to support such studies, we need to develop a sufficient capacity of high-resolution instruments capable of detecting complex mixtures of exogenous and endogenous chemicals, and a broad interdisciplinary expertise allowing for development of innovative methods for non-target profiling of mixtures characteristic for human internal and external exposures, suspect screening for emerging contaminants, and high-throughput multi-residual methods capable of providing confirmatory quantitative data for hazard assessment. These methods will complement portfolio of existing “ omics” technologies applied in the biomedical research and support assessment of the exposure-effect associations.

A need for integrative analysis of available interdisciplinary data on exposure, susceptibility and effect markers originating from various technologies together with data on environmental and social stressors, food basket and consumer product contamination, satellite data, self-reported information on the life-style, diet or health and wellbeing or data from the health registers will drive development of a robust data management capacities, bioinformatics tools, omics-based approaches, remote sensing technologies, GIS-based computational platforms and exposure models using advanced artificial intelligence.

This will significantly contribute to maturation of the science community striving to translate the exposome concept to practical solutions as well as of the currently emerging infrastructural network, and opens a door for a completely new direction of the population‐based research enabling joint assessment of the chemical exposures and their downstream biological effects which can be linked to health outcomes.