Expanding the Concept of Translational Research: Making a Place for Environmental Health Sciences.

SUMMARY: The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) introduces a new translational research framework that builds upon previous biomedical models to create a more comprehensive and integrated environmental health paradigm. The framework was developed as a graphical construct that illustrates the complexity of designing, implementing, and tracking translational research in environmental health. We conceptualize translational research as a series of concentric rings and nodes, defining "translation" as movement either from one ring to another or between nodes on a ring. A "Fundamental Questions" ring expands upon the research described in other frameworks as "basic" to include three interrelated concepts critical to basic science research: research questions, experimental settings, and organisms. This feature enables us to capture more granularity and thus facilitates an approach for categorizing translational research and its growth over time. We anticipate that the framework will help researchers develop compelling long-term translational research stories and accelerate public health impacts by clearly mapping out opportunities for collaborations. By using this paradigm, researchers everywhere will be better positioned to design research programs, identify research partners based on cross-disciplinary research needs, identify stakeholders who are likely to use the research for environmental decision-making and intervention, and track progress toward common goals. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP3657.

Review of developmental origins of health and disease publications in environmental epidemiology.

The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) scientific field investigates the influence of early life environmental stressors on later life health outcomes. Environmental chemical exposures are a particular focus area within this field. Although the DOHaD hypothesis originated in the 1990s, the data evaluating this hypothesis in environmental epidemiology has not been comprehensively summarized. We conducted a scoping literature review to describe the human evidence for the DOHaD hypothesis and to identify, 1) where there may be reasonable data to draw conclusions, and 2) areas warranting further research. Using PubMed and Web of Science we identified 425 publications through 2014 that met our criteria for evaluating the DOHaD hypothesis in environmental epidemiology. These publications covered 60 different chemicals. The majority of publications focused on neurological/cognitive outcomes, followed by cancer, and respiratory outcomes. We note areas ready for more detailed review, those requiring more data and ideas for future directions.

Towards precision prevention: Technologies for identifying healthy individuals with high risk of disease.

The rise of advanced technologies for characterizing human populations at the molecular level, from sequence to function, is shifting disease prevention paradigms toward personalized strategies. Because minimization of adverse outcomes is a key driver for treatment decisions for diseased populations, developing personalized therapy strategies represent an important dimension of both precision medicine and personalized prevention. In this commentary, we highlight recently developed enabling technologies in the field of DNA damage, DNA repair, and mutagenesis. We propose that omics approaches and functional assays can be integrated into population studies that fuse basic, translational and clinical research with commercial expertise in order to accelerate personalized prevention and treatment of cancer and other diseases linked to aberrant responses to DNA damage. This collaborative approach is generally applicable to efforts to develop data-driven, individualized prevention and treatment strategies for other diseases. We also recommend strategies for maximizing the use of biological samples for epidemiological studies, and for applying emerging technologies to clinical applications.