Advancing Science, Improving Health: A Plan for Environmental Health Research

     A year ago, Virginia Ladd remarked in her InFocus "President/Executive Director's message" that AARDA had representation among the Strategic Plan Participants for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). That group's work has resulted in the new National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Strategic Plan 2012-2017, "Advancing Science, Improving Health: A Plan for Environmental Health Research," which was adopted in August 2012. While we can't present the plan in its entirety in this newsletter, we are pleased to share a brief overview.

     The mission of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is to discover how the environment affects people in order to promote healthier lives. The vision of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is to provide global leadership for innovative research that improves public health by preventing disease and disability.
Six themes are involved in carrying out the mission: Fundamental Research, Exposure Research, Translational Science, Health Disparities and Global Environmental Health, Training and Education, and Communications and Engagement.

     One crosscutting theme is Knowledge Management. Environmental effects on health and disease are complex, and understanding these effects requires an integrated and comprehensive approach to data management. Across the environmental health sciences community, there is a need for centralizing, accessing, and analyzing diverse environmental health data through public resources. A path forward could include leveraging multiple sources of existing data, which are now unconnected, and create better ways to connect and access these data, to address pressing environmental health questions into the future.

     The second crosscutting theme is Collaborative and Integrative Approaches. An overarching theme identified during the NIEHS strategic planning process is the importance of collaborative and integrative approaches to environmental health sciences. The research enterprise for environmental health sciences needs to be positioned to exploit all relevant disciplines in a coordinated, integrated fashion to solve these complex problems. In addition to interdisciplinary approaches to fulfilling its science mission, NIEHS must also work to develop innovative collaborations with sister agencies, communities, and other partners, to effectively translate this knowledge, to inform prevention and interventions, as well as to guide stakeholder decision-making at all levels.

Eleven goals listed in the Strategic Plan are the following:
1. Identify and understand fundamental shared mechanisms or common biological pathways, e.g., inflammation, epigenetic changes, oxidative stress, mutagenesis, etc., underlying a broad range of complex diseases, in order to enable the development of applicable prevention and intervention strategies.
2. Understand individual susceptibility across the life span to chronic, complex diseases resulting from environmental factors, in basic and population-based studies, to facilitate prevention and decrease public health burden.
3. Transform exposure science by enabling consideration of the totality of human exposures and links to biological pathways, and create a blueprint for incorporating exposure science into human health studies.
4. Understand how combined environmental exposures affect disease pathogenesis.
5. Identify and respond to emerging environmental threats to human health, on both a local and global scale.
6. Establish an environmental health disparities research agenda to understand the disproportionate risks of disease, and to define and support public health and prevention solutions in affected populations.
7. Use knowledge management techniques to create a collaborative environment for the EHS community, to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to investigate, analyze, and disseminate findings.
8. Enhance the teaching of EHS at all levels of education and training--kindergarten through professional--to increase scientific literacy and generate awareness of the health consequences of environmental exposures.
9. Inspire a diverse and well-trained cadre of scientists to move our transformative environmental health science forward, and train the next generation of EHS leaders from a wider range of scientific disciplines and diverse backgrounds.
10. Evaluate the economic impact of policies, practices, and behaviors that reduce exposure to environmental toxicants, through prevention of disease and disabilities, and invest in research programs to test how prevention improves public health and minimizes economic burden.
11. Promote bidirectional communication and collaboration between researchers and stakeholders, e.g., policy-makers, clinicians, intervention and prevention practitioners, and the public, in order to advance research translation in the environmental health sciences.

     Linda S. Birnbaum, Ph.D., Director, NIEHS and National Toxicology Program (NTP), says, ". . . we are pursuing some of the 'big influences' that have been understudied, all of which interact with traditional environmental exposures: the microbiome, for example, and inflammation pathways, immunological pathways, nutrition, and epigenetic process. We also want to lead the process of defining the 'exposome,' which is the totality of exposure encountered by humans." She points out that the NTP is a problem-solving program. She says, "For example, the NTP is part of our consortium on bisphenol A, . . . ."

     Dr. Birnbaum says, "The NTP is moving beyond the traditional approaches of testing one chemical at a time and are taking on the significant challenge of evaluating mixtures. We are also looking at the effects of exposures through the life span, expanding our research and testing to include prenatal exposures and how they link to adult disease."

     Dr. Birnbaum observes, "The newest research clearly shows that biology is affected by low doses of chemicals, often within the range of general population exposure, and that these biological changes can be harmful, especially during periods of development."

     Dr. Birnbaum declares, "The NIEHS's job doesn't stop with the publication of scientific results. We also have an obligation to help translate the nation's research investment into public health intervention, new policy, and preventive clinical practice."

     Of the Strategic Plan itself, Dr. Birnbaum says that it is an attempt to "provide fresh perspective, and bring new understanding to problems in environmental health through application of innovative knowledge and problem-solving." She says, "We hope that the themes and goals will provide the framework for setting expectations for what can be accomplished and how we will get there."

     We at AARDA are proud to have had input on this important planning document since we know there is an environmental component to autoimmune diseases. We trust that this national, indeed global, study and plan of action will bring much needed answers. It's none too soon!