Exposomics is an emerging discipline that aims to do for environmental influences on the body what the Human Genome Project did for genetic ones. Several studies suggest that the causes of disease are about 20% genetic and 80% environmental—numbers not reflected in the relative effort put into investigating them. Exposomics would look at all types of environmental exposures—physical, biological, psychological and social, as well as chemical—systematically, and from conception to grave.
Thomas Hartung, an environmental toxicologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, announced the Human Exposome Project in May 2025. The project consists of a secretariat of researchers from around the world, co-ordinated from Johns Hopkins. Dr Hartung has spent his career trying to replace animal testing with organoids and artificial intelligence.
Gary Miller, a toxicologist at Columbia University, has compared exposomics' current state with genomics' early days, when genes of strong effect had been found but the intricate system of feedback loops running the genome was still a black box.
In America, the National Institutes of Health has backed the creation of NEXUS (Network for Exposomics in the US), led by Dr Miller and colleagues, though it has received only a few million dollars.
In Europe, the European Union created EHEN (the European Human Exposome Network), a pilot backed in 2020 to the tune of €105m ($115m). Jana Klanova of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, is involved in two EU follow-up projects.
Exposomicists hope AI models analogous to large language models could make sense of multiple environmental factors and how they interact, correlating these with disease states. Dr Hartung has modelled the toxic properties of novel molecules using AI trained on known effects of existing ones; his model's accuracy rose from 65% in 2015 to 91% in 2025.
The sensitivity of mass spectroscopes, crucial for identifying chemical pollutants, is doubling every three to four years. Biobanks such as the UK Biobank and the China Kadoorie Biobank each track more than 500,000 people.
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