ABSTRACT
EU research efforts are aiming to a fundamental shift in looking at health, moving research away from the ‘one exposure, one disease’ understanding to an integrated view upon which to build solid, cost-effective preventive actions and policies in future. The European Exposome Network is a unique initiative from the EC with a budget of 100 MEUR, making it the largest research investment ever by the EC. The network brings together 9 research consortia funded in the frame of the “Human Exposome Project: a toolbox for assessing and addressing the impact of environment on health” Grant agreement ID 874662. The project HEAP (12 MEUR) lead by Karolinska, Stockholm is one of the 9 projects funded and brings together 11 European partners plus Stanford University as associated partner. HEAP will provide a research environment for the integrated and efficient analysis of the human exposome. One primary outcome of the project is the complete process for obtaining actionable knowledge from systematically collected data. For instance, data about genetic material from viruses and bacteria found in biobanked patient samples can be compared with later cancer development and thereby hitherto unknown causal agents of cancer might be discovered.
The platform customised for exposome assessment will provide a decision support system for researchers, policymakers, and industry. All the data managed and processed by HEAP will be available for future research and can be enriched with new data and analysis pipelines and can be deployed in multiple instances to create a network towards producing shareable and reusable knowledge to promote health for the benefit of society.
We are very proud being part of such a great project.
