New Institute for Exposomic Research Will Study Lifelong Effects of Environmental Exposures

Mar 20, 2017 | Featured, Research

Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is establishing the Institute for Exposomic Research under the leadership of Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH, and Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH, two international leaders in environmental health. The Institute, the first in the world focused on exposomics, will study the effects of environmental exposures on health and will translate these findings into new strategies for prevention and treatment.

“The exposome is a new research field and is analogous to genomics,” says Dr. Robert Wright, Ethel H. Wise Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, and Director, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg Environmental Health Sciences Laboratory. “While genomics concerns all the genetic factors that predict health, the exposome encompasses all the environmental factors that affect your health, including nutrition, social factors, chemicals, and the physical environment, from the time you are conceived until the time you die. To understand health, you must understand both fields.” He is Director of the Institute, and its Co-Director is Dr. Rosalind Wright, Horace W. Goldsmith Professor in Children’s Health Research and Dean of Translational Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine.

Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH

The Institute will build upon the expertise of the Lautenberg Laboratory to develop new technologies and methodologies in exposomics. Mount Sinai’s recent investment in the field has already led to significant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including a $9 million grant in December for Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO), to investigate the effects of a broad range of environmental exposures on children’s long-term health, and two additional $10 million NIH grants for the Children’s Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) program. CHEAR provides laboratory resources to measure environmental chemicals, metabolites, hormones, and other factors representing components of the human exposome. The CHEAR grants also fund a Data Repository, Analysis, and Science Center, led by Susan L. Teitelbaum, PhD, Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, that specializes in analyzing exposomic big data.

A major part of the CHEAR facilities’ mission will be analyzing the samples collected by ECHO, a seven-year study of 50,000 children followed longitudinally across the United States. Mount Sinai is part of a consortium that includes programs in Boston and Virginia and will recruit 5,000 of these subjects. The Wrights are part of the committees now setting up protocols for the national ECHO study.

The doctors have been collaborating for more than 20 years. They first met in medical school at the University of Michigan. Rosalind Wright specialized in critical care and adult pulmonary medicine and Robert Wright in medical toxicology and pediatric emergency medicine. Over the years their interests converged, in large part because they were both concerned by the environmental issues that brought their patients to the hospital. “For me it became an issue of prevention,” Dr. Rosalind Wright says. “Taking care of someone with very advanced, end-stage lung disease, I could adjust medications so the patient could walk a little farther or sleep a little better. But I thought, ‘Where do we start so that we can give people a healthier life overall, as well as help them live longer?’ Getting them to stop smoking, for example, has a small effect. But if we go back to the root of the unhealthy trends, we can have a huge impact. For example, I was struck by the data showing that if a mother smokes during pregnancy or she experiences high stress in pregnancy, the child will have decreased lung function by age 6 or 7, and that lower lung function will track over their life and make them more likely to develop chronic lung disease.”

The new Institute will expand exposomics into research programs in disciplines across campus, including personalized medicine, cancer, women’s health, aging, immunology, and clinical trials. “Intuitively, we all know that our environment plays the major role in shaping our health, but until recently the tools to measure environment on an ‘omic’ scale didn’t exist. That’s the future, and it aligns with the changes happening in health care,” Dr. Robert Wright says. “As Mount Sinai’s leadership says, population health, not fee for service, is the future, and that means prevention. Investing in understanding exposomics will give us the tools for prevention.”