Author: Toby Athersuch

HELIX project kicks off

The HELIX project consortium (The Human Early-Life Exposome – novel tools for integrating early-life environmental exposures and child health across Europe), which officially began on 1st January 2013, have met for its official kickoff meeting at CREAL (Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology), Barcelona.  This EU FP7 project will exploit novel tools and methods, including omics and smartphone-based personal exposure monitoring, to characterise early-life exposure to a wide range of environmental hazards, and integrate these with data on major child health outcomes.

Researchers at Imperial, led by Dr Muireann Coen of the Department of Surgery and Cancer, will contribute to the metabolic profiling (metabonomics/metabolomics) in the project. This using high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS) analyses of biospecimens collected from multiple mother-child cohorts across Europe.

Further details can be found on the HELIX website.

Dr Toby Athersuch
Lecturer in Environmental Toxicology
School of Public Health