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The IDAEA-CSIC participates in the global iChemAtlas initiative, which will help better understand the impact of environmental contaminants on human health
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The project jointly evaluates the risk of multiple chemical substances, providing a more realistic picture of population exposure
The chemical exposome is the set of substances to which the population is exposed daily. | Erik Mclean, Pexels
An international team involving more than 20 institutions has taken a key step towards building the first map of the human chemical exposome: the set of chemical contaminants present in the human body originating from the environment. The study, published in Nature Medicine, lays the foundations for a new approach to understanding how environmental exposure affects human health.
The Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA-CSIC) is involved in this study through researchers Pablo Gago Ferrero, Montse Marquès Bueno and Rubén Gil-Solsona, as part of an international consortium led by the France Exposome initiative.
The article introduces iChemAtlas (Human Internal Chemical Exposome Atlas), a collaborative initiative that combines different mass spectrometry platforms to significantly expand the capacity to detect and characterise chemical contaminants in human biological samples, such as blood and urine.
A key challenge for public health
Pollution is responsible for nearly 9 million premature deaths worldwide each year, representing a major challenge for human health. However, little is still known about the combined effects of the multiple substances to which populations are exposed on a daily basis.
In this context, the concept of the exposome emerges, encompassing all environmental exposures throughout an individual’s lifetime.
“So far, research and regulation have focused on studying individual substances or groups of substances. But this is not enough to understand the real complexity of human exposure,” explains Pablo Gago Ferrero, researcher at IDAEA-CSIC and co-author of the study.
In a first phase, the consortium analysed samples from 800 individuals, including men, women and children, from a national biomonitoring programme in France. The results revealed the presence of more than 250 different chemical substances in blood and urine, many of them occurring simultaneously. In addition to well-known contaminants such as pesticides, plasticisers or industrial compounds, the approach will enable the identification of thousands of additional chemical signals in the future, including emerging and poorly studied substances.
“In a second phase of the study, we will focus on emerging contaminants, which are often overlooked in population studies due to the analytical complexity involved in detecting them,” says Rubén Gil-Solsona, researcher at IDAEA-CSIC and co-author of the study.
a–c, The framework is based on strategic pooling of population-level biospecimens (blood and urine) from the national human biomonitoring program (a), followed by collaborative multi-platform mass spectrometry analysis (b). Detected substances across chemical categories through targeted analyses conducted by partner laboratories on pooled blood and urine samples from the French Esteban study (c). | David A., et al. 2026
A new generation of analytical tools for risk assessment
The project represents a paradigm shift in chemical risk assessment by proposing tools capable of analysing multiple exposures in an integrated way, closer to real-life conditions.
“These tools will have applications in public health, environmental regulation and even personalised medicine, by enabling the link between chemical exposure profiles and diseases or treatment responses,” adds Montse Marquès Bueno, researcher at IDAEA-CSIC and co-author of the study.
The iChemAtlas initiative is conceived as a global and open effort. The consortium plans to develop a digital platform to share the generated data, facilitating its use by the scientific community and policy-makers.
David, A., Lennon, S., Mercier, F. et al. Mapping the human chemical exposome for public health. Nature Medicine (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-026-04289-7
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