Your genes are important for defining physical traits like height, hair, and skin color. But they don’t fully capture who you are. Your surroundings play a huge role in shaping your personality, preferences, and even your health. Factors like diet, social life, pollution, exercise, and education often have a bigger impact than genetics on many personal attributes.
Understanding how genetics and environment work together can help us figure out our risk for asthma, heart disease, cancer, and other conditions. The field of genomics has made it easier than ever to test for genetic variations linked to disease, both in hospitals and at home.
In recent years, scientists have focused on identifying environmental factors that increase disease risk. They’re also working on how to tailor treatments based on individual exposures, which is promising for personalized medicine.
As a pharmacologist and toxicologist, I’m involved in the exciting new field of exposomics. This area studies how various environmental factors—like physical, chemical, and social influences—affect our biology. While your genome comprises your inherited genes, your exposome includes everything you’ve been exposed to throughout your life. Just as we analyze DNA to understand genetics, exposomics researchers track numerous environmental factors to see their effects on health.
The reality is that standard medications don’t work for everyone. It can take time to find the right treatment for high blood pressure or depression. Adverse drug reactions lead to over a million visits to emergency rooms in the U.S. each year. Why do some medications work for some and not others? It could be due to genetics, medication adherence, or environmental influences.
Your surroundings play a significant role in how effective your medications are. For instance, consuming grapefruit while on certain meds can be risky. Grapefruit juice can interfere with enzymes that break down drugs, leading to higher drug levels that might become toxic.
But grapefruit isn’t the only factor. Thousands of chemicals are common in our daily lives. Many of these can interact with medications, potentially altering their effectiveness.
Some substances used to treat pets for fleas and ticks may also influence how medications are processed in the body. For example, they might make a cholesterol medication break down too quickly to be effective. Additionally, air pollutants from cars and wood fires can affect enzymes that metabolize drugs, leading to diminished effects of asthma medications.
Fortunately, advances in technology are helping researchers identify which chemicals impact treatment efficacy. Hospitals can measure various molecules in blood, which is already helping diagnose and monitor health conditions. Scientists can detect thousands of compounds, revealing everything from pollutants to how your body responds to food and medications.
Tools like mass spectrometers, which analyze chemical substances, can pinpoint environmental chemicals and also show how your body processes medications. This gives scientists a clearer picture of how your environment might affect your treatment.
My colleagues and I are working on a project called IndiPHARM, which aims to collect data on all the chemicals in your body. By combining this with genetic information, we hope to find out how environmental factors affect medication efficacy. This could lead to more customized treatment plans, such as adjusting medication dosages or exploring new drug options altogether.
We’re starting with conditions like obesity and diabetes, where treatment responses vary widely. Our goal is to ensure that every patient benefits from personalized approaches to medicine. We envision a future where doctors can tailor treatments based on both genetic and environmental factors, significantly reducing the trial-and-error approach typically involved in finding the right medication.
