Invisible threads: how our environment quietly shapes disease
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The EEN represents relationships among chemical exposures, where each node corresponds to a chemical compound and edges indicate shared biological activity. Nodes are coloured according to community structure, highlighting broad clusters of exposures with shared connectivity patterns.
view moreCredit: Christiane V.R. Hütter
From the air we breathe to the food we eat, we are constantly exposed to thousands of chemicals – yet how these exposures affect our health has remained surprisingly difficult to understand. 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, published in Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-72402-y), offers a unifying view: diverse substances can disrupt the same biological systems and thereby contribute to disease risk in predictable ways.
Environmental pollution is estimated to contribute to around one in six deaths worldwide, but scientists have long struggled to connect specific exposures to specific diseases. One reason is the sheer complexity of the “exposome” – the totality of all environmental influences a person encounters over a lifetime. Traditionally, chemicals have been grouped by their structure or origin, but this says little about what they actually do inside the body. Two nearly identical molecules can have completely different effects, while entirely unrelated substances may trigger the same illness. This has made it difficult to move from observation to understanding.
A new study, led by Jörg Menche, CeMM Adjunct PI and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine and first authored by former PhD Student at CeMM and LBI NetMed (now PostDoc at Harvard Medical School) Salvo Danilo Lombardo, takes a different route: instead of asking what chemicals look like, the researchers asked what they do. They compiled nearly 10,000 environmental exposures, ranging from pollutants and food components to medications, and mapped how each one affects human genes. The result is a large-scale network that links exposures based on shared biological effects.
When the researchers zoomed in on this network, a striking pattern emerged: Exposures grouped into clusters that reflect common biological functions, such as inflammation, metabolism, or blood clotting. Within these clusters, chemically diverse compounds like pharmaceuticals and environmental toxins were found to act on the same molecular pathways. The network showed that the body responds to these exposures not based on their chemical identity, but on the biological systems they perturb.
A map of hidden biological connections
To understand why some exposures are more harmful than others, the team looked at where their effects occur within the cell’s internal wiring, the so-called “protein interaction network”. Here, not all proteins are equal: some act as central hubs, coordinating many essential processes. The study shows that exposures targeting these hubs tend to be more damaging. Even a single hit to a highly connected protein can ripple through the system, amplifying its impact. This provides a simple but powerful principle: the more central the biological target, the greater the potential harm.
The researchers then took a step further, asking whether these molecular insights could help explain real-world disease patterns. By comparing their network predictions with large-scale health and environmental data from across Europe, they found that countries with higher levels of certain exposures also showed higher rates of diseases connected to those exposures at the molecular level. This suggests that the biological “distance” between an exposure and a disease, as measured within the network, can help predict which health outcomes are likely to occur.
From molecules to public health
“Taken together, the findings offer a new way of thinking about how the environment influences health,” says corresponding author Jörg Menche. “Rather than treating each chemical in isolation, the study shows that many exposures converge on shared biological pathways, forming a complex but structured system of interactions. By mapping these connections, researchers can begin to anticipate the health effects of exposures – even those that have not yet been studied in detail.”
This work provides a foundation for a more systematic understanding of the exposome, bridging the gap between molecular biology and public health. In the long term, such approaches could help identify hidden risks, improve environmental monitoring, and support strategies to reduce disease burden.
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The CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is an international, independent and interdisciplinary research institution for molecular medicine under the scientific direction of Maria Rescignio. CeMM is oriented towards medical needs and integrates basic research and clinical expertise to develop innovative diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for precision medicine. Research focuses on cancer, inflammation, metabolic and immune disorders, rare diseases and aging. The Institute's research building is located on the campus of the Medical University and the Vienna General Hospital. www.cemm.at
The overarching ambition of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine at the University of Vienna is to leverage network theory, machine learning and artificial intelligence to formulate a holistic view of the intricate cross-scale nature of human biology and to translate the gained insights to concrete medical impact ranging from diagnosis to treatment. The LBI-NetMed pursues research lines along the hierarchical biological organization from molecules to tissues, organs, the whole-body system, and finally the population level. In parallel, a next generation data exploration platform will be developed aiming to open up entirely new ways of integrating and interpreting complex biomedical data. Work at the LBI-NetMed happens in close collaboration with clinical and industry partners to translate, validate and implement results on these fundamental questions into medical practice. netmed.lbg.ac.at
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Journal
Nature Communications
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Cells
Article Title
A network-based map of the chemical exposome connects molecular interactions to public health
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