EXPOMET: Transforming Our Understanding of Environmental Contaminants and Breast Cancer
Chronic diseases are on the rise, particularly as our population ages. However, the environmental factors that influence disease risk remain poorly understood. People are exposed to countless chemicals every day, making it extremely difficult to measure these exposures and even harder to uncover how they disrupt biological processes and may cause disease. To tackle this challenge, the concept of the exposome, i.e. the totality of chemical exposures over a lifetime and their biological effects, was proposed. Progress in this field, however, has been slowed down by a lack of suitable analytical technologies.
The EXPOMET project aims to develop innovative analytical tools to advance the emerging field of exposome research, with a particular focus on breast cancer risk and endocrine disruption. The work will involve the development of novel mass spectrometry-based methods and bioinformatic solutions, to process the mass spectrometric data and integrate it with other omics datasets. This integration will facilitate systems toxicology analyses, providing a more comprehensive understanding of environmental influences on health. The newly established global workflows will be applied in an exposome-wide association study (ExWAS) focused on breast cancer. Using data from the ORDET cohort, the study seeks to systematically evaluate environmental exposures as risk factors for the disease. In addition, the project will investigate the functional impact of real-life exposures identified through the ExWAS. Using cell models, researchers will apply metabolomic-guided systems toxicology approaches to examine the metabolic effects of complex chemical mixtures.
