The Human Exposome Project will map how environmental factors shape health

Feb 18th 2026|Phoenix, Arizona|6 min read

IF TIMING IS everything, then Thomas Hartung picked a bad moment to make his move. Dr Hartung is an environmental toxicologist at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, who has spent his career trying to replace animal testing with specialised tissue cultures called organoids and, more recently, with artificial intelligence. Last May, he announced his most ambitious endeavour yet—to create a Human Exposome Project. It is ambitious because it aims to do for environmental influences on the body what the Human Genome Project did for genetic ones. And it was badly timed because it came shortly after the election of an American administration that is the most hostile to environmental matters in living memory.