High-Throughput Analysis and High-Frequency Sampling for Chemical Exposomics (HiChem)

The exposome is a concept in health research that encourages new techniques to study environmental exposures in studies of thousands of individuals, with high temporal resolution throughout the life course.

Exposure to environmental contaminants is already recognized as a risk factor for chronic disease, but with over 350,000 chemicals in global use, and hundreds of pollutants detectable in human blood, the specific causes are rarely identifiable.

The chemical exposome is now accessible to health researchers by exquisitely sensitive and comprehensive mass spectrometry techniques called ‘chemical exposomics’.

While these methods can detect thousands of known and unknown environmental substances in small blood samples, the approaches are too slow to be applied in powered health studies.

Moreover, due to limitations of venipuncture, few cohorts have biobanked multiple blood samples from each participant, thus variability of the chemical exposome cannot be adequately explored.

The HiChem project will develop and validate high-throughput chemical exposomic methods in multi-well plates for plasma and whole blood, with additional support for blood microsamples collected by minimally invasive commercial devices that are safe for high-frequency blood sampling outside the clinic.

Novel studies on the temporal dynamics of the chemical exposome will be demonstrated in HiChem, and the techniques will be offered to all researchers in Sweden through the National Facility for Exposomics.