Human Exposome Project
You are more than your genes
Our health is shaped not only by our DNA, but by everything we encounter throughout our lives — the air we breathe, food we eat, places we inhabit, how we move and sleep, and our social and psychological environments.
Together, these exposures — and the biological responses they generate — form the human exposome.
The Human Exposome Project is an emerging international scientific mission to understand how these lifelong exposures interact with our biology to shape health, resilience and ageing — and to translate that knowledge into better prevention.
Tina Woods is a Steering Committee member of the Human Exposome Project, helping translate exposome science into real-world application.
From science to action
The Human Exposome Project is rapidly evolving from an ambitious scientific idea into an international movement.
The 2025 Exposome Moonshot Forum in Washington DC brought together hundreds of scientists, policymakers, industry leaders and innovators to accelerate a coordinated global approach to exposome research.
The Global Exposome Summit 2026 moved the agenda further towards operationalising the exposome — connecting science with policy, data infrastructure, technology and real-world implementation. Its programme explicitly addressed cities and built environments, wearables, AI and exposomics in practice.
The question is increasingly moving from What shapes our health? to How can we use this knowledge to create healthier lives and environments?
Designing environments for healthy longevity
Collider Health is exploring how this emerging science can inform a new generation of Healthy Longevity Infrastructure.
Cities, buildings and communities continually expose us to combinations of physical, environmental, behavioural and social influences. Understanding these interactions could help developers, investors, policymakers and communities design places that actively support healthier lives.
The emerging Healthy Longevity Infrastructure Framework (HLIF) aims to connect exposome data, biomarkers, technology and health outcomes — creating a practical framework for translating exposome science into healthier places.
What if the places we create were measured not simply by what we build, but by how much they improve people's lives?
It’s time for bold, radical change. To improve health outcomes we need to tackle complex interacting drivers of health and disease, including lifestyle, socioeconomic factors and cumulative exposures to physical and social environments. We need understand environmental factors encompassed in the exposome n terms of helping humans not only to survive but to have the resilience to adapt to stress and to thrive in their ‘real world’.
The world as a laboratory
A Nature Medicine paper on cities, communities and clinics as exposome testbeds co-authored by Tina Woods proposed a new approach: using the places where people actually live as real-world laboratories for health.
By bringing together environmental sensing, wearables, digital phenotyping, clinical measures, multi-omics and AI, we can begin to understand how our environments interact with our biology over time.
The opportunity is profound: What if we could move from simply measuring health to designing for health?
This idea is now developing into Human Exposome Testbeds — real-world environments where exposures, biology and health outcomes can be studied together.
Beyond the adverse exposome
Much of exposome science has understandably concentrated on what harms us: pollution, toxins, deprivation, isolation and chronic stress.
But that raises another important question: What about the exposures that help us thrive? Belonging. Purpose. Friendship. Creativity. Music. Movement. Nature. Community.
Could these experiences also become biologically embedded over time — influencing resilience, intrinsic capacity and healthy ageing?
Collider Health has established the Positive Psychosocial Exposome Initiative to investigate this comparatively unexplored dimension of the human exposome.
Its flagship research programme, the JoyScore Experiment, is developing from early studies of music, movement and social connection into a broader international research platform exploring how cumulative positive psychosocial exposures become biologically embedded throughout life. Your current prospectus positions this explicitly as an extension of the wider exposome paradigm.