Deciphering how environmental exposures cause chronic inflammatory diseases.
Our accumulation of environmental exposures from birth, termed “the exposome”, has a profound impact on our chance of developing a chronic condition, accounting for up to 90% of disease risk.
Whilst we have identified associations between some factors and certain diseases (e.g. air pollution and asthma), we still know very little about the biological mechanisms driving this progression.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) in Exposome Immunology, a £50 million joint initiative between The University of Manchester and the University of Oxford, will investigate how environmental exposures contribute to chronic inflammatory diseases.
On this page:
What is the exposome?
Each person encounters a unique combination of environmental exposures over their lifetime.
Some major exposome factors include:
- air pollution;
- occupational hazards;
- diet;
- infections;
- climate;
- socioeconomic status.
What we'll do
Identify common pathways
Working with environmental scientists, epidemiologists and clinicians, we will use computational methods to identify common pathways disrupting the immune system, which can be validated in the laboratory and human challenge studies.
These findings will pave the way for a new era of medicine where a patient’s prior exposures are fully considered, leading to more accurate diagnoses, better prevention, and more effective treatment options.
Create a discovery pipeline
We will generate a mechanistic discovery pipeline spanning three Research Pillars (RPs) that can be deployed against any emerging environmental factor.
The pipeline will be built by studying how three exemplar exposome factors (air pollution, smoking, and viral infection) cause and exacerbate asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Our research pillars
Data foundation
By integrating multimodal datasets from large human cohort studies and laboratory experiments, we will identify disease signatures and predict pathways by which exposome factors modulate immune regulation in barrier tissues.
Mechanistic barrier immunology
We will leverage cutting-edge approaches from pre-clinical mouse models, primary human tissues and organotypic models to mechanistically dissect exposome-factor induced pathways of immune regulation and their contributions to disease pathology.
Experimental medicine
Our experimental predictions will be validated through human challenge and interventional proof-of-mechanism studies, not only helping translate solutions towards patient benefit, but creating an iterative cycle by feeding data back to refine models built from the data foundation.
Contact us
How to get in touch
For more details about our work or to find out more, contact:
Dr Bruce Humphrey
Centre Operations Manager
Email: bruce.humphrey@manchester.ac.uk
Centre Directors
Prof Judi Allen
Director, Manchester
Research profile
Dame Prof Fiona Powrie
Co-director, Oxford
Research profile (Oxford)
