NIH Award Creates Columbia-Led Exposomics Coordinating Center

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $7,722,583 to Columbia University to oversee the new NEXUS: Network for Exposomics in the U.S. Coordinating Center to organize and stimulate research on the human exposome—the cumulative measure of environmental exposures and corresponding biological responses.

The NEXUS Coordinating Center is led by Gary Miller, PhD, Vice Dean for Research Strategy and Innovation and Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health; Chirag Patel, PhD, Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School; and Rima Habre, ScD, Associate Professor of Population and Health Sciences at the University of Southern California. Its members include many of the leading researchers in the emerging field, from City University of New York, Delaware State, Emory, Johns Hopkins University, Morehouse, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of California San Francisco, Harvard, University of North Carolina, University of Southern California, and Yale.

Rick Woychik, PhD, Director of  NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences noted “We view the global community of practice that will be established by NEXUS as the critical next step in operationalizing exposomics and making environmental exposure assessment, using the exposome framework, an integral part of biomedical research. By providing a systematic analysis of the non-genetic factors that influence health, exposomics will complement genomics and lead to better approaches to prevent and treat human disease.”

A core feature of NEXUS is to support the use of exposomics among all NIH Institutes and Centers. Yet its ambitions are much greater, explains Miller, who is also director of the Columbia Mailman Center for Innovative Exposomics.  “We are proposing to transform the entire biomedical and public health enterprise by inculcating the importance of comprehensive and systematic analysis of the environmental drivers of health and disease,” he says. “Our goal: operationalize and embed exposomics throughout the entire biomedical enterprise to advance precision environmental health.”

NEXUS will establish a framework and best practices for exposomics analysis of biological and environmental samples, develop a framework for geospatial-based exposomics studies of environmental and social influences on health and disease, and create a comprehensive exposomics digital framework to support precision environmental health. It will also engage with multidisciplinary academic, community, and industry partners, in the U.S. and around the world, and will support bootcamps, conferences, and other learning opportunities to grow exposomics as a field, with attention to overcoming socioeconomic inequities.

“For the exposome to become a scientific and public health reality, it must involve investigators from across the world and from many disciplines. NEXUS is designed to provide the necessary scientific and administrative coordination to propel exposomics into the future. It will establish the standard for exposomics profiling that integrates digital, biological, and geospatial markers to make exposome- wide association studies a reality for studies of all human diseases establishing the paradigm for how we study the environment and human disease and providing the environmental complement to genomics,” says Miller.

NEXUS is funded by five NIH Institutes including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, National Institute of Neurological Disorders, and the Office of Research on Women's Health.