in one of the first studies of its kind, a group of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have developed a novel precision health framework that leverages multi-omics to understand environment-related diseases. The findings were published in the journal Environment International. To showcase how the proposed methods can be used towards precision health investigations, the team carried out a study examining how mercury exposure in utero might impact the risk of developing liver injury in childhood. Jesse Goodrich and his colleagues developed three data analysis approaches that integrated multi-omics to uncover insights on prenatal mercury induced childhood fatty liver disease, a common liver condition in children that can cause severe health issues.  The first method for analyzing this type of data identifies multi-omics biomarkers of environment-associated diseases years after the environmental exposure. The second method aims to identify altered biological pathways that inform environment-associated diseases. The third method identifies groups of individuals at the highest risk of disease based on different patterns of what they have been exposed to.

Current guidelines recommend that pregnant people receive a vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—which typically causes mild, cold-like symptoms in most adults but can be deadly for infants—during weeks 32–36 of pregnancy. New research led by investigators at Mass General Brigham suggests that vaccination earlier in that timeframe, closer to 32 weeks, could provide the best protection for newborns against RSV. The findings are published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.