This world-first health study, GenV, will follow the health of more than 50,000 babies born in Victoria between 2021 and 2023. It will further track the health of their mothers and fathers. In this work, Professor Melissa Wake is the driving force. Its goal is to determine how influences in early life impact a person’s health and wellness across their life span. GenV explores the complex interactions between genetics and the environment. Their hope is to find the common causes of diseases such as asthma, obesity and mental illness.
The new study will track these families through pregnancy and beyond, gathering rich biological and health information at critical points in development. GenV will monitor a range of environmental exposures, including air quality and resources that support their community. This would allow them to develop a new, holistic map of all health influencers. This innovative approach aligns with the global efforts of The Human Exposome Project, which aims to comprehensively analyze environmental factors that impact human biology.
The Scope and Significance of GenV
GenV isn’t your typical health study, in fact it’s aiming to be the largest of its kind in the world. So, get ready for some 125,000 new kids and parents to sign up! This enormous longitudinal study is being conducted at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, which started recruiting participants in 2021.
Professor Wake emphasizes the study’s significance: “At a population level, more people are dying from diseases that we ought to be able to prevent … and it’s now become clear that children are likely to face shorter life spans than their parents.” GenV’s long-term commitment allows researchers to study health outcomes over decades. This rich data will yield profound insights that can inform and transform public health practice.
Dr. Sillé, a key researcher involved in The Human Exposome Project, notes the importance of understanding environmental interactions: “If the genome is your biological blueprint, the exposome is the lifelong record of how the world interacts with that blueprint.” This view is one reason why the goal of GenV is to break down how external forces can change an individual’s risk of disease.
Investigating Health Interventions
A second, important aspect of GenV is its emphasis on evaluating health interventions. Even one of the best known examples of new findings being discovered is the result of active intervention studies, as Professor Wake elucidated. “As people go through life, we can work with them and say, ‘What’s happened to your pathways as opposed to another person’s pathways, and can we actually alter that?” This method will allow researchers to determine if changes in lifestyle or environment can effectively reduce disease risk.
Dr. Osborne concurs, noting that the problem is that it’s a challenge to untangle what people are being exposed to. “Quite often you might have the ‘bad’ genes, but if you’re not exposed to the ‘bad’ environment, you don’t get the disease,” he stated. The interplay between genetic predisposition and environmental factors is crucial for understanding chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
GenV’s holistic approach will enable researchers to determine the health signals that lie between risk factors and later-life health consequences. That understanding might inform better-targeted prevention strategies and create more specialized, population-specific approaches.
Mapping Environmental Influences
The family and community-level data collection will be used to understand the broader context of exposure as well as the layers of the exposome. GenV wants to better understand how things like air quality, food supply and access to healthcare create inequities in health.
Dr. Osborne elaborated on the relationship between environmental factors and health: “There’s a very strong relationship between our gut bacteria and our immune system and brain and many of the functions in the body.” This interdisciplinary connection underscores the importance of knowing both the mechanisms by which environmental exposures can exacerbate physiological conditions as well as their impacts.
As Professor Wake pointed out, chronic inflammation is at the root of most of today’s life-threatening diseases. This entails an array of maladies from cancer to mental health disorders. “We’re finding more and more that chronic inflammation seems to drive many of the ‘big five’ diseases we’re confronted with,” she noted. GenV looks at these connections to determine what’s important and discover what’s actionable. The positioning of society to protect the health of a nation that starts before birth.
