MRC Centre for Environment and Health

Environmental exposures are increasingly recognised as playing a fundamental role in the development and exacerbation of human diseases, against a background of genetic susceptibility. Estimates suggest that 70% to 90% of disease risks are due to differences in environments. Over half of the world's population now lives in urban environments (around 3.5 billion people worldwide and increasing). Therefore, the built environment plays a critical role in shaping population exposure to environmental hazards, both in the UK and other high-income countries and in Lower and Middle-Income Countries. Urban living is accompanied by a range of environmental challenges including air and noise pollution, especially related to transport networks, access to green space, housing quality and other exposures such as non-ionising radiation from the panoply of digital communications systems and devices. Many environmental exposures are ubiquitous and therefore we are all exposed to a greater or lesser extent (e.g. air pollution). Given the overwhelming importance of the environment in determining variation in disease rates both between and across populations, there is great potential to reduce morbidity and mortality from disease, and increase life expectancy, from appropriate interventions and controls on environmental exposures. By contrast, although genetic susceptibility is important, genes contribute overall to a relatively small component of disease variation in populations and are much less open to manipulation than the environment. Therefore, to have major impact on disease occurrence, we need to i) identify existing and emerging environmental hazards, ii) quantify the risk to human individuals and populations, iii) better understand the mode of action and toxic properties of such environmental contaminants, and iv) help identify populations and individuals at greatest risk so that interventions (including prevention policies and treatments) can be appropriately targeted. In this second renewal period of the Centre, we propose to focus our research efforts on three ubiquitous environmental challenges, air pollution, noise pollution and non-ionising radiation. We propose to take a holistic ('whole systems') approach to understand the influence of the environment on disease development, progression and exacerbation. We will focus on the influence of urban environments on health, at population, individual and molecular levels. We will exploit developments in i) low-cost technologies that will help measure the extent that individuals are exposed to specific pollutants (e.g. from air); ii) comprehensive assessment of advanced analytical methods that provide information from biological samples (blood, urine) on exposure to environmental contaminants; iii) information on exposure to environmental hazards collected from wearable devices and from satellite images (e.g. air pollution), and other data sources that capture the complexity of human interactions with the city environment; iv) new methods that allow us to combine data from a variety of sources and analyse them together to better understand the relationships of environmental factors and health. To address the issues related to the analysis of very large datasets, we will link to the investments that have been made in Health Data Research (HDR) UK (both Imperial and King's are part of the HDR UK London substantive site). We will utilise and further advance developments in computational techniques to gain new knowledge on the causal links between environment and health. In this way we aim to help identify individuals at greatest risk from their exposures to environmental hazards, and thus plan for appropriate messaging to the public, mitigation and prevention of the effects of the adverse environmental exposures on health.