Device for Monitoring Environmental Exposures

Researchers at Stanford have developed a device to monitor environmental exposure in personal (wearable) or public (stationary) settings. Human health can be viewed as the interactive outcome between inherited traits and environmental risks. The exposome is a measure of all the exposures- both biotic (bacteria, viruses, pollen, etc.) and abiotic chemicals (smog, pesticides, etc.)- an individual has during his/her lifetime and how they relate to health. Understanding an individual's exposome in addition to his or her genetic predispositions would help make precision medicine more effective. Currently, accurate portable devices to monitor the exposome are lacking. To overcome this limitation, the inventors have developed this device for collecting and monitoring environmental exposure in personal and public settings. The device couples a proprietary advanced genomic analysis pipeline (see Stanford Docket S16-445) with chemical analysis technologies to detect a diverse variety of environmental agents. By combining personal exposome and genomic analysis, this device could determine the cause of a disease and enable personalized treatment with unprecedented precision.

Stage of research
Prototypes have been developed and validation studies show great promise. Additional development is ongoing.