From the air we breathe to the food we eat, people are continually exposed to thousands of chemicals, yet understanding how these substances influence health has remained a major scientific challenge. A new study led by researchers at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine at the University of Vienna offers a new way to make sense of these complex environmental influences. Published in Nature Communications, the research suggests that very different substances can disrupt the same biological systems, creating patterns that may help scientists predict how environmental exposures contribute to disease.
Environmental pollution is estimated to play a role in around one in six deaths worldwide, but linking individual exposures to specific illnesses has proved difficult. Much of the problem lies in the complexity of the “exposome”, the complete collection of environmental influences a person encounters throughout life. Chemicals have traditionally been classified according to their structure or origin, but these characteristics do not necessarily reveal how they affect the human body. Two chemically similar substances may produce very different biological effects, while unrelated compounds can disturb the same processes and contribute to similar diseases.
To overcome this problem, a research team led by Jörg Menche, CeMM Adjunct Principal Investigator and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine, focused on what chemicals do rather than what they look like. The study was first authored by Salvo Danilo Lombardo, a former PhD student at CeMM and LBI NetMed, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School. The scientists compiled information on nearly 10,000 environmental exposures, including pollutants, food components and medications, and mapped how each substance affects human genes. This produced a large network connecting exposures according to their shared biological effects.
The network revealed a striking pattern. Exposures formed clusters linked to common biological functions, including inflammation, metabolism and blood clotting. Chemically diverse substances, from pharmaceuticals to environmental toxins, often acted on the same molecular pathways. The findings suggest that the body does not necessarily respond to an exposure according to its chemical identity. Instead, the health effects of a substance may depend largely on which biological systems it disrupts. By identifying these shared pathways, researchers can uncover hidden connections between exposures that might otherwise appear completely unrelated.
The researchers also examined where these disruptions occur within the cell’s protein interaction network. Some proteins act as highly connected hubs that coordinate numerous essential biological processes, making them particularly important to the stability of the body’s molecular systems. The study found that exposures targeting these central proteins tend to have more damaging effects. A disruption involving even one highly connected protein can spread through the wider biological network and amplify its consequences. The researchers then compared their molecular predictions with large-scale health and environmental data from across Europe. Countries with higher levels of certain exposures also tended to have higher rates of diseases molecularly connected to those substances, suggesting that the biological “distance” between an exposure and a disease could help predict health outcomes.
The findings offer a broader framework for understanding how the unseen environment shapes human health. Rather than examining every chemical in isolation, the approach shows that thousands of exposures can converge on shared biological pathways within a complex but structured network. Menche says mapping these connections could eventually allow researchers to anticipate the health effects of substances that have not yet been studied extensively. By bridging molecular biology and public health, the research provides a foundation for a more systematic understanding of the exposome. It could ultimately help identify hidden environmental risks, strengthen monitoring efforts and guide strategies aimed at reducing the global burden of disease.
More information: Salvo Danilo Lombardo et al, A network-based map of the chemical exposome connects molecular interactions to public health, Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72402-y
Journal information: Nature Communications Provided by CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
