Defining air exposomics – The bridge between air pollution exposure and human health

The air we breathe is an important conduit of chemical exposures, and the science that we typically study in small molecule chemistry, we study metabolomics, the chemical phenotype of humans, how that manifests is partly endogenous, partly from our own metabolism, but it is largely influenced by our environment. The environments around us can be water, they can be from foods, but air, air we breathe all the time, right? So studying that, and what we call the airborne exposome, we call that the science of air exposomics.

I think what makes bridging air exposomics and human biology so challenging is that both are quite transient. Both are quite dynamic. So if we look internally at human biochemistry, things can change very quickly. Perhaps if you breathe something in, you have inflammation for a short, quick response. That is one kind of response, one kind of metabolic process. But also, over time, we see things like cognitive decline exhibit as a disease that is a slow, slow progression. We see effects of the airborne exposome on cognitive development, perhaps in children. It is also a slow progression. So the biology has different time domains, and also the exposures themselves are very dynamic.

So when you wake up in the morning and you move through your house, you are experiencing one air environment. When you go out onto the street, you are experiencing another. When you get into your car, you are experiencing another. So these are two very dynamic processes coming together and interacting in a very complex way. That requires understanding of biochemistry, but it also requires understanding of maybe geospatial mapping of where you have been, where wind patterns are, and where pollutant emitters might be.

Bruker is focused on the entire exposure cascade from source through to health outcome, right? So we look at exactly where these sources are, we look at what the doses that people get are over time, what the metabolic effects are, and then what the short and then longer term health outcomes are. So that is the exposure cascade, how either acute exposures of maybe a high magnitude, or lower long term exposures, affect ultimately human health.

So I think the right time for air exposomics is emerging now because people have much more of a feeling of what the environmental exposures do to their own health. And this has become, with the advent of PFAS, with the advent of water contamination, something that has come to the public interest. But air lags a little bit behind. Why? Maybe it is because we have not had the technologies to see the things in air.

So now we understand particulates, PM2.5s, we understand things like that. But with technologies like we are developing within Bruker, with the TOFWERK systems, we are able to visualize, in a spectral sense, VOCs, VICs, gases, metals. We are able to see things that really we did not know were there before. So in a way this is kind of an age of realization for us that is driven by analytical technologies.

The urgency in doing so, I think, largely comes from the fact that we have greatly polluted the world in certain urban environments. It has become a huge concern. So there is research that is driving the discovery of these things, and then there is governmental regulation that is driving an effort to reduce them, all in the interest of public health. So we aim to enable that fight against pollution and for the benefit of public health.

TOFWERK in the past has done incredible research with atmospheric chemistry research, with air quality monitoring, and invented innovative tools for doing so. Today, as a part of Bruker, we are connected to human health research in a way that was not possible before. So we are working with people on the biological side who are interested in metabolomics, proteomics, lipidomics, all the omics that describe our human phenotypes, our chemical phenotypes, and we are bridging that back to the deep air metrology experience that TOFWERK has as a brand.