Our Research

The UK has minimal routine assessment of common environmental exposures including PFAS, flame retardants, pesticides, VOCs, endocrine disruptors and metals and relies on ad-hoc studies. We also have little understanding of how exposures to multiple hazards affect our health. For example, UK risk assessment of air pollution, the most characterised environmental risk factor, does not take account of multiple pollutants nor co-exposures to noise, heat, bioaerosols or chemicals.

UoL has considerable expertise in the areas of environmental epidemiology, exposure modelling, proteomics and metabolomics. We have an excellent track record in use of large national and local ethnically diverse cohorts (e.g., UK Biobank EXCEED) and are enhancing these and cohorts in the Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (LLC) with new air pollutant and noise data.

We will:

• Define a prioritise list of chemicals of concern for the UK.
• Conduct large-scale health studies using patient and volunteer data. These will help us to identify health impacts of chemicals and air pollution in the UK – and how other factors may worsen effects. For example, transport noise, higher temperatures and pollen levels, may worsen impacts of air pollution.
• Identify ways a chemical can affect human cells, measuring thousands of samples at a time using cutting edge technology in omics analysis.

Microbial communities exist throughout the environment (environmental microbiome) and colonise the airways, gut and skin (human microbiome). Diverse environmental and human microbiomes benefit human health, with disruption leading to chronic diseases such as increased infections, allergic airway disease, bronchiectasis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, inflammatory bowel disease and cancer.

These environmental and human microbiomes interact with each other and wider environmental factors, including chemicals, metals, other pollutants and climate/meteorological variables, to impact human health. However, the underlying biological processes linking disruption of the environmental and human microbiomes with health outcomes, and the effect of chemical exposures or other environmental and human factors on these processes and outcomes, remain largely unknown.

Ground-breaking research at Leicester has demonstrated that air pollutants and metals directly interact with bacteria in a way that can impact infectious acute and chronic disease and also lead to allergic asthma, allergic rhinitis and atopic dermatitis. While pesticides, arsenic and ethanol exposure have also been shown to disrupt the human gut microbiome and metabolic functions, the direct influence of chemicals/other metals on bacterial and fungal communities is less well studied. Whether and how air pollutants and chemicals/metals increase both microbial pathogenicity and allergenicity requires further investigation. This is a novel research area with potential to result in a paradigm shift in chemical and environmental risk assessment.

We will:

• Explore the impact of metals and chemicals on the human microbiome.
• Develop improved human relevant exposure and air way models.
• Undertake real time monitoring of bioaerosols (such as pollen).

UKHSA responds to many incidents involving emissions into the environment each year, including spills, releases, large industrial-related fires and wildfires. This theme supports UKHSA’s strategic priority to respond with innovative applied research, drawing on University of Leicester’s considerable expertise in chemical sensors, ‘breathomics’, artificial intelligence and modelling exposure and effects.

Our research will support acute and chronic incident response through developing improvements to environmental monitoring, early detection of hazardous substances, and understanding of where the greatest needs are for targeted action.

We will:

• Develop new technologies to detect chemicals in emergency situations.
• Develop laboratory techniques to rapidly detect exposure to chemicals in the environment and through analysis of breath in people.
• Develop statistical and computing techniques, including artificial intelligence, will help us understand which chemicals, metals and environmental exposures may be causing us harm.