New Delhi:
Dean of Shri Ramchandra Institute of Higher Education and Research, Dr. Kalpana Balakrishnan said that India stands at the desire to reopen its understanding and prevent disease, to become a global leader in exposomics research.
Ms. Balakrishnan, who was part of a recent platform on the exposomics organized by the University of Johns Hopkins at Washington DC, told PTI that the unique mixture of India’s traditional and modern health risks makes it “a natural laboratory” for exposure science.
The word “Exosom” was given by Dr. in 2005. Christopher was coined by Wilde. This refers to the totality of environmental risks that individuals experience throughout their lifetime, from conception to death.
Unlike a genome, which is inherited and fixed, the exposom is dynamic, ever-shifting and deeply associated with health results.
Given that genes and genetic sensitivity alone cannot explain why people develop a chronic disease, Ms. Balakrishnan said, “Someone may not have genetic markers for heart disease or diabetes, but still ends with many environmental exposure experienced in a life course with them. While the human genome project advanced genetic science within a decade, diseases affecting the issues of cardiovascular system, endocrine disorders and mental health are poorly understood through genetics alone, they explained, explain, emphasizing the need for cutting-edge tools, which can catch the explosion with chemical, physical, biological and mental social threats, and the exposure or living conditions can catch the exposure or living conditions with their living conditions. Can catch
Asked about what kind of equipment and technologies are required for exposure mapping, Ms. Balakrishnan told PTI that high resolution mass spectrometry (HRM) that can screen thousands of chemical compounds in air, water, soil and food together is one of the major technologies.
He said, “You do not just test for what you expect – A, B, and C. You do uncontrolled analysis to search for D, E, F and further. Otherwise, you remain blind to the unknown,” he said.
For biological reactions, a suit of omix platforms including the next generation sequencing (NGS) and metabolomics, protomics and genomics is important.
“These help us understand how internal systems react to exposure,” Ms. Balakrishnan said, given that samples from blood, urine and other tissues provide significant biological signature.
However, the exposomics is not limited to the laboratory. It now includes satellite-borne data for physical risks such as air pollution, urban heat island, vegetation cover and land-utilization changes.
“We can map environmental factors on high spatial resolution for the entire population,” he said, it is particularly important for a country like India, where environmental risk sector and socio -economic status are quite different.
Highlighting the complexity of exposure data, Ms. Balakrishnan, who is also the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), who is a partner for professional environmental health, mentioned that it requires deep education and AI-operated pattern recognition beyond basic statistical methods to map it.
“These computational equipment are important. We need to make them an understanding of environmental samples, biological reactions and mass demographics, leveled dataset,” Ms. Balakrishnan told PTI.
She further referred to the successful model in North American and European Exasom Consortia, where patterns between pollution, green places and genetic variants are predicting risks for diseases such as diabetes and heart conditions.
“Imagine if we can repeat and scale here in India,” he said.
India’s opportunity lies in its landscape, including traditional public health challenges such as poor hygiene and lack of clean water. These challenges exist with modern dangers such as ultra-related food, air pollution and psychological stress.
“We are seeing exposure overload from both ends,” said Ms. Balakrishnan. He said, “This is why we need a holistic, integrated structure in many ongoing cohorts in the country, and exposomics can give us this,” he said.
Emphasizing that India cannot rely on silent scientific perspectives, he further said that this is not just a job of medical scientists.
“We need engineers, economists, social scientists and urban planners in the room – from the beginning with policy makers,” they insisted.
Adding an international perspective, Dr. Reema Habre, Associate Professor of Environmental Health and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California and co-director of NIH-funded Nexus Center for Exosom Research Coordination, said that India has immense capability for global cooperation in Exposic.
Speaking to PTI, Habre said, “I am associated with Dr. Balakrishnan around Exposomics in a recent visit to Ahmedabad, India, where both of us were invited to an ICMR-NIOH conference.
“I presented my vision at the Nexus Center, which I co-depleted to add the US-Gary Miller and Dr. Chirag Patel, as well as the US-based and international researchers and infrastructure to the global exposure initiative.” He said that India’s diversity of environment and social stresses is the shape of unique regional policies and cultural practices, providing unique insight into the totality of health-packed risks.
Habre said, “Dr. Balakrishnan’s work in the establishment of large, population-based colleagues in India is fundamental for Exposomics,” said, Habre said, linked globally but locally governed structures to reduce the environmental burden of the disease.
The Center for Health Analytics Research and Trends (Chart), Ashok University Director Poronima Prabhakaran resonated emotions.
India’s longitudinal research provides a fertile land to lead large -scale exposomics studies to lead the references of developing countries in infrastructure infrastructure, he told PTI.
He said, “As a global effort to collect exposics, we should be responsible for a rush of biomarkers, environmental risk factors and ‘omix’ and the congestion of diverse risks in the population,” she said.
It is already in the light of the recent exposure moonshot forum hosted at Washington DC, where there is already an attempt in the European Union (Erin) and now in the US (Nexus) and Irene, which is to start this attempt globally, Prabhakaran said.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
