EIRENE maps out the impact of the environment on health

Chronic diseases such as cancer, asthma and COPD are often linked to environmental factors. Think about such behaviour as smoking or unhealthy eating and environmental pollution. But the real causal links are sometimes difficult to pinpoint or to include in a risk assessment. We are usually exposed to several factors at once, and the extent to which this happens is constantly changing and depends, for example, upon where we live and work. And this includes not only recognisable factors such as chemical pollution or unhealthy food, but also, for example, noise pollution, magnetic radiation, disturbed day-night rhythms and stress. All these environmental factors taken together form the so-called exposome - all the things to which we are consequently exposed as humans. 

In order to map out the impact of the exposome on our health, and in particular chronic diseases, scientifically, the European Commission wants to help create a new, ambitious European research infrastructure. With EIRENE (Environmental Exposure Assessment Research Infrastructure), Europe could have a distributed but balanced network of research capabilities spread across the EU member states later this decade. EIRENE was added in 2021 to the road map of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), the European body responsible for strategic research infrastructures. 

But before EIRENE can be effectively rolled out and implemented, a thorough exploration and preparation phase will run until the end of 2025. This will be carried out under the EIRENE PPP (Preparatory Phase Project). This project will address all the relevant aspects of the envisaged research infrastructure: technical, legal, managerial, financial and strategic. An important part will be the analysis of gaps in the area of the infrastructure. The necessary political and financial support will also be sought from the member states and any non-member countries. Eventually, this should all lead to a coordinated research infrastructure. VITO is one of the 20 European research institutes involved in EIRENE PPP. 

Stakeholders and data management 

The late Gudrun Koppen was involved in efforts at VITO to get EIRENE put on the ESFRI road map. Since EIRENE PPP began then in October 2022, several VITO experts have been working towards achieving these objectives. For instance, Jos Bessems leads the "work package" which aims to involve stakeholders (from researchers to funding organisations to policymakers) in the best possible way in further preparations within the research infrastructure consortium (EIRENE ERIC). Then in turn, Jan Theunis is involved in the work package with respect to the data management which needs to be developed. In doing so, the so-called FAIR principles are applied:  data must be retrievable, accessible, inter-operable (compatible with each other) and reusable. VITO has extensive experience in this area: Jan Theunis leads the work package in this area for the European Partnership for Chemical Risk Assessment (PARC). 

Also at the Flemish level, within our region, there are activities linked to EIRENE. With support from the FWO, Flemish institutes within the EIRENE Flanders project can purchase their own research equipment, again with a view to mapping out the impact of the exposome on health. Within this project, VITO has purchased two new devices in 2023: a mass spectrometer (for molecular analyses) and a proteomics device (for protein characterisation). Moreover, VITO is working towards the development of a Flemish exposome data hub. Besides VITO, the University of Antwerp, KU Leuven, the University of Ghent and the Flemish Department for the Environment are also participating in EIRENE Flanders. 

VITO will form part of EIRENE with its research equipment. The European scale of the research infrastructure will then make it possible to set up large cohort studies in which many people from the general population will participate. This will allow the impact of the exposome on human health to be studied more effectively. "In this kind of research, you need to have large numbers of participants," says Bessems. "In principle, you could bring together several existing smaller studies for this purpose, but today this is still very difficult because they have a different design, for example, or the data is not compatible. EIRENE would make this possible, though, and this will increase the statistical reliability of exposome studies, which will make links between exposure and effect easier to discover and consequently allow us to engage with real scientific evidence."