College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences

Research increasingly shows that tackling modifiable exposures and environmental risks could be one of our most powerful levers for longevity and health span.

Scientists say this knowledge could help us design better solutions to create environments that promote human health to address the global health and economic crises caused by the chronic disease epidemic and ageing demographic.

Now a new paper published in Nature Medicine today, co-authored by University of Glasgow Professor Paul Shiels, sets out why leading scientists are calling for a ‘Human Exposome Project’ a generation on from the Human Genome Project, to understand how the ‘exposome’, encapsulated by external exposures (including social, behavioural and geo-physical factors) and their interaction with internal factors (such as genetics and physiology), affect an individual’s health and overall resilience.

Professor Shiels created the concept of the Exposome of Ageing in 2021, and it has since gained traction around the world. The concept shows that while genetics play a role in our health, modifiable environmental factors explain far more about the variation in premature mortality between individuals and different populations than genes do.

It is already understood that specific environmental factors can activate pathological pathways that contribute to disease and accelerate aging. The ability to capture, analyse and link individual data outside the medical record can show how external exposures a human experiences across their lifetime affects their health. Researchers says these interactions can now be much better understood at an individual level and can be traced with unprecedented precision using artificial intelligence. This understanding at a personal level will be a significant leap forward in determining the impact of the exposome at an aggregated, population health level.

Focusing on the Human Exposome has the potential to increase our understanding of how individual health is determined by non-genetic factors in people’s wider environments, and shape more effective public health interventions urgently needed to shift investment and policy away from an increasingly unsustainable healthcare model to one more rooted in prevention.

Tina Woods, Steering Committee Member, Exposome Moonshot Forum CEO, Collider Health; executive director of the International Institute of Longevity, and corresponding author says: “The time for the Human Exposome Project has come. The ageing demographic and chronic disease epidemic is creating an economic drag in many nations, and the current model of healthcare focused on treating disease is unsustainable. We now have the tools to demonstrate the return on investing in health and incentivising prevention.”

Professor Paul Shiels, Professor of Geroscience at the University of Glasgow and co-author of the study, said: “It is thrilling to see the concept of the exposome of ageing, originally developed to understand the extremes of age-related health inequalities at the University of Glasgow, blossom into a global approach to move sick care into the realm of healthcare.”

Professor David Furman, Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Director of the Stanford 1000 Immunomes Project, and corresponding author says: “At a time of increasing environmental threats to human health such as air pollution and microplastics, we have the technologies like applied artificial intelligence to help us to unravel the complex interactions between environment, immunity and health at an individual level that can be aggregated up to get a true picture of the relative impact drivers of population health.”

The study, ‘Cities, communities and clinics can be testbeds for human exposome and aging research, is published in Nature Medicine.

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Enquiries: ali.howard@glasgow.ac.uk or elizabeth.mcmeekin@glasgow.ac.uk

First published: 12 March 2025