Scientists working on an ambitious project to map how individuals’ lifetime exposure to environmental factors shapes their health are exploring ways to collaborate with South African researchers.
The Human Exposome Moonshot Project is a “once in a generation opportunity” to systematically catalogue how food additives, pesticides, stress and a host of other factors influence a person’s susceptibility to disease, said Prof Thomas Hartung from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a member of the moonshot project’s organising committee.
It was vital to involve scientists from South Africa from the outset, as it was home to distinct communities that had been exposed to some of the environmental influences the project sought to understand, he told reporters at the World Conference of Science Journalism in Pretoria on Tuesday.
These include farming communities exposed to pesticides and people living near industrial plants or mines that give off a range of pollutants. Identifying the factors that were responsible for conditions ranging from autism to cancer could lead to new diagnostic tools, treatments and public health interventions to limit people’s exposure to disease triggers, he said.
“The immediate advantage of a project like this is it identifies risk factors, and public health measures can restrict or ban chemicals, or stop people living near these sites.
“Industry is not really a villain, [intent on] poisoning its customers, but they want hard facts. If you produce high-quality associations, this is convincing,” he said.
About 4,500 food additives were used in the food industry, 80% of which had no adequate safety data, he said.
The project intends to start with mapping the exposome for 100,000 volunteers from 30 countries across six continents.
While the world would benefit from any knowledge gained by studying a specific cohort of people, the public health interventions arising from these insights could have a profound effect in their countries, he said.
Rapid technological advances, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, increasingly precise mass spectrometry and alternatives to animal testing, offered the opportunity to accelerate the painstaking processes scientists had so far used to link environmental factors to disease, said Hartug.
Investments now would yield substantial healthcare savings down the line, as it would enable the prevention of diseases that are costly to treat. Research on the human exposome has strong support from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is expected to announce a call for funding proposals early next year.
On Monday Hartung met South African scientists, including experts from the South African Medical Research Council and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
“The time is now for South Africa and Africa to get involved. We have proposed a pan-African network,” said Ndumiso Cingo, who chairs the Science Diplomacy Capital for Africa’s steering committee. Scientists raised the need for a benefit-sharing framework to ensure communities that participated in the research had fair and timely access to the benefits arising from the work, he said.
“There are also concerns about data ownership and storage,” he said, noting that most cloud storage was located in the Global North.
- Kahn’s travel to the conference was covered by a media grant from the Global Human Exposome Forum.
