At the end of April, the global exposomics community gathered in Sitges, Spain, just outside of Barcelona, for the Global Exposome Summit, bringing together researchers, policymakers, public health leaders, and industry experts to advance the field of exposomics. The meeting was hosted by the International Human Exposome Network ( IHEN) and the Global Exposome Forum, and organized by ISGlobal and the Global Exposome Summit Organizing Committee.
This conference provided an opportunity to discuss scientific progress in the field and the future direction of exposomics globally. The structure of this conference fostered scientific collaboration, meaningful discussions, and direct engagement with key policymakers, providing participants with the opportunity to exchange ideas and ask questions.
The first day of the conference was focused on key deliverables of the IHEN project, and Europe’s efforts to advance exposomics and related policy. A series of panel discussions highlighted a range of topics, including an interim roadmap focused on exposome research in Europe, which was developed by IHEN and its partners. The roadmap outlined five urgent goals for policymakers, scientists, industry and citizens. Day two was focused on scientific advances in the field of exposomics with a series of presentations and poster sessions that covered the full breath of the global field including the urban exposome, early life exposome, chemical exposome, wearables and sensors, indoor exposome, microbiome, data platform, mass-spectrometry methods and much more.
Read IHEN’s recap of the Global Exposome Summit.
The theme of day three of the summit was “building the global exposome community,” It was organized by the Global Exposome Forum and provided the opportunity for greater discussion among attendees, building on ongoing and launching into new collaborations towards this goal. The first four parallel sessions were co-lead by NEXUS leadership, and were designed to mirror the areas of focus and expertise critical to advancing exposomics. These panels were a great opportunity to highlight the work of NEXUS and the international GEF working groups around these domains.
The panel “ExWAS and Big data / AI” was moderated and organized by NEXUS MPI and Co-lead of the NEXUS Data Science Hub Chirag Patel, Harvard University, and featured: Alison Motsinger-Reif, NIEHS; Vasilis Vasiliou, Yale University; Heidi Hanson, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Marc Chadeau-Hyam, Imperial College London; John P.A. Ioannidis, Stanford University; Mingliang Fang, Fudan University and Arjun Manrai, Harvard University. This panel of experts highlighted both the transformative potential and major limitations of AI in exposome research. The anchoring prompt was, how would you define an exposome investigation? What are its key characteristics, and what role does AI play in this frontier?
A major takeaway from the panel discussion was that the scientific community knows what the calibration layer needs to contain, and this is not limited to exposomics, but all of biomedical sciences. Definitions are important. Mechanism before pattern. Training that produces both computational fluency and domain depth, rather than one without the other. Incentives that reward reproducibility and translation, not just throughput.
Chirag Patel commented, “ The exposome is finally taking shape as a coherent scientific category: a system, cumulative and multi-level, that links external environment to human health across a lifetime. AI is probably going to be central to investigating it. Whether that investigation actually saves lives, or just generates magnificent structures from thin air, is up to us.”
Read the full article recap of this panel discussion.
The “Geospatial Methods and Applications” panel was co-moderated by NEXUS MPI and Co-lead of the NEXUS Geospatial Sciences Hub, Rima Habre, University of Southern California, and Kees de Hoogh, Utrecht University. It featured: Itai Kloog, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Jean-Baptiste Guimbaud, Meersens; Hüseyin Küçükali, Utrecht University; Anne Thessen. University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill; Thahn H. (Helen) Nguyen, University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign.
This panel discussed the ever-growing need for scalability (in space and time) and for validation of large, multimodal geospatial models to predict and characterize the external exposome which continue to be challenged by computational demands, but also by the global imbalance in ground measurements which are necessary to train and improve these models to achieve performance metrics necessary for health research. And while AI advances are changing the scale of what is feasible or possible, the expert panel emphasized the importance of human-driven AI as a framing, to leverage AI to solve the most pressing problems identified by the domain experts, who can then validate and stress test the solutions. The need for locally driven capacity building, common language, and guidance on data quality standards were identified as priority needs, with the now global Geospatial Sciences Working Group of the GEF, co-led by Habre and De Hoogh, proving the collaborative space and mechanism to advance these priorities.
The “Wearables” panel was moderated by NEXUS Chembio Analytical Sciences Hub Krystal Pollitt, Yale University and featured: Thomas Hankemeier, Leiden University; Chao Jiang, Zhejiang University; Jos Bessems,VITO; Ville Pimenoff, University of Oulu; Johannes Zauner, Technical University of Munich. The panel opened by surveying the current landscape of wearable platforms available for personal exposure assessment, encompassing passive chemical samplers, real-time environmental sensors, and physiological and activity monitors, before turning to panellists’ visions for an ideal wearable platform and the most promising technologies on the horizon.
Discussion covered compliance and participant burden, cost versus scalability, and the need for rigorous validation frameworks as persistent translational barriers to moving emerging technologies from controlled validation studies into large longitudinal cohorts. Looking ahead, the panel converged on four priorities for the field: harmonisation of data standards and FAIR data outputs to enable cross-cohort meta-analysis; rigorous validation of novel technologies across varied populations and real-world settings; strategies to improve participant engagement and wearable acceptability; and a concerted push toward translational impact linking individual-level exposure trajectories to intervention design and multi-omics integration.
The “Chemical and biological analytics” panel was co-moderated by Jonathan Martin, Stockholm University and Elliott Price, Masaryk University, and featured panelists Adrian Covaci, University of Antwerp; Benedikt Warth, University of Vienna; Jessica Ewald, EMBL-EBI; Dinesh Barupal, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Lauren Petrick, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Lea Maitre, ISGlobal; Paolo Vineis, Imperial College London. This panel began by imagining a world where precision environmental health is implemented in routine health care, including regular biofluid sampling to assess environmental chemical exposures and/or biomarkers of effect. The group then were asked to comment on the following questions: who should be prioritized in such screening, which samples should be taken and at what frequency or life stage, and what should be measured using currently feasible technologies to maximize clinical and/or public health benefit?
Key take-aways from the ensuing responses and discussion identified key gaps in communication of results of exposomics measurement findings to the consuming public and the need for thoughtful assessment of underlying financials and legislations. In terms of what research and infrastructures should be prioritized in the next 12 months, the panel identified the need to define which chemicals should be measured and which should be reported (and not siloed from environmental analytics and other molecular multi-omics), a QA/QC framework elaboration and uptake for chemical measurements, and a demarcation of a research agenda towards potential for translation into decision-making as a long-term venture.
These four parallel session provided the fundamental pillars of exposomics research, which were followed up in the afternoon by three additional parallel sessions which focused on Exposomics in practice and discussed Cities as testbeds, Individual exposomics (& precision health), and next steps for cohorts which discussed the multitude of applications that exposomics is being implemented and the current work that is being done around the world. Day three also featured multiple plenary sessions which covered topics including: “Framing the Discussion,” “Partnering for Success” “Exposome and policy: creating insightful, actionable and ethical solutions” and a closing session which outlined next steps for the field. These sessions featured key leaders of National Institutes of Health including NIEHS Director Kyle Walsh, and the NIEHS Director of the Division of Extramural Research and Training, David Balshaw. Policy leaders and scientists from around the world to cover the full breadth of the current field and where we are heading.
Overall, The Global Exposome Summit provided the perfect venue to continue sharing and building on the coordinating and collaborative efforts that are the mission of the NEXUS center and team, including the NEXUS Harmonization Initiative led by the ChemBio Analytical Sciences Hub, and its efforts in supporting the growth of the Global Exposome Forum as the international gathering space for the exposomics community.
The level of enthusiasm and energy at the meeting was palpable. Momentum for exposomics continues to grow. The field must continue to perform studies that reveal the power of exposomics and continue to push this knowledge out to a broader audience. This Summit also provided an opportunity to record several episodes of The NEXUS Podcast with leaders in the field. These episodes will be released over the upcoming weeks and months. We are so grateful for everyone who took the time to contribute.
NEXUS is looking forward to the next Global Exposome Summit in 2027 in the Washington D.C. area.