12 February 2024
Our health is shaped by environmental factors that we humans are exposed to on a daily basis: what we eat, the air we breathe, our social interactions and lifestyle choices such as smoking and exercising. It explains an estimated seventy percent of the chronic disease burden. Since most aspects of our environment are modifiable, this provides a huge potential for disease prevention.
Leading scientist in Europe and the USA have formalised the sum of all these environmental drivers of health and diseases as the exposome. The relatively new concept is trying to capture everything to understand which, how, in what quantities, and in what circumstances environmental drivers have an effect on our health. Interacting with the genome, it defines individual health at different stages throughout the life course.
Much remains to be discovered about the exposome, and therefore about the development of chronic diseases. In collaboration with Exposome-NL, the Exposome-Scan facility will apply innovative techniques to investigate which factors of the exposome are important for health and how these factors work.
The unique and large-scale open facility Exposome-Scan gives researchers from all over the Netherlands the opportunity to study the exposome. Anyone who submits a good research request will have access to the research facility and will be able to conduct research at Exposome-Scan at cost price. The facility in Leiden opens on 15 February 2024 and builds on the knowledge gained in the Exposome-NL and X-omics research programmes.
Read More
