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A new £50 million MRC centre led by the University of Manchester will investigate how environmental exposures contribute to chronic inflammatory conditions, aiming to uncover new prevention and treatment strategies

The University of Manchester is launching a new £50 million research centre to investigate how environmental exposures contribute to the development of chronic diseases. Backed by the Medical Research Council, the centre will bring together experts to explore how factors such as pollution and lifestyle influence conditions like arthritis, asthma, and inflammatory bowel disease.

Exploring the link between the environment and chronic diseases

Research studies have revealed the critical role that environmental exposure plays in our risk of developing chronic diseases, with 30,000 deaths attributed to air pollution alone in the UK each year.

To address this growing concern, a new research centre based at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford will support world-leading immunologists in understanding the totality of environmental factors to which we are exposed over our lifetimes, known as “the exposome”, and how these factors can alter our immune systems to cause chronic diseases.

Up to £50 million is to be invested in a Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence (MRC CoRE) in Exposome Immunology over the next 14 years.

These environmental exposures, including microbes and toxins, primarily interact with our bodies at what we call ‘mucosal barrier sites,’ such as the lungs and intestines. Here, they are met by our immune cells, and can alter how the immune system functions, leading to chronic inflammation in certain tissues and causing diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Embracing AI technology

The centre will utilise AI technology to analyse large datasets, such as the UK Biobank, patient cohorts, and long-term studies in hospital clinics, and identify common pathways by which environmental factors disrupt the immune system. Findings will be tested through laboratory studies and by exposing healthy volunteers to pollutants and common viral infections, leading to more accurate diagnoses, better prevention, and more effective treatment options.

Professor Judi Allen, from The University of Manchester, is Director of the MRC CoRE in Exposome Immunology.

She said: “Globally, we’re facing a crisis in chronic inflammatory diseases, such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease. For decades, we’ve been studying how our genes make us susceptible to disease. While very valuable, genetics has only got us so far. We need to understand how our environment interacts with our genes to make our immune system malfunction.”

“We will benefit from advances in new technologies to identify which of the many complex factors may be important in driving disease, but what’s different about our new Centre is that we are going to define how these environmental factors alter the immune system and how that impacts inflammation. Changing environments, often made worse by socioeconomic disparities and rising pollution, appear to be increasing the rates of these diseases, making it even more imperative to find the causes.”

“We hope to later expand our research to include more environmental factors, such as mould and microplastics, which are growing concerns. An ultimate goal of this research would be to discover the underlying causes of these chronic diseases so we can develop better prevention and treatments.”

Professor Fiona Powrie, co-director of the MRC CoRE in Exposome Immunology, from the University of Oxford, said: “This is an exciting opportunity to bring together complementary expertise in the University of Manchester and the University of Oxford to build a multidisciplinary team to tackle this challenge. Our Centre will train a new generation of scientists working across biology and environmental science, future proofing our efforts to combat the health effects of a changing environment.”

Professor Patrick Chinnery, MRC Executive Chair, said: “This new MRC Centre of Research Excellence will transform our understanding of how lifelong environmental exposures shape immune health and cause chronic inflammatory diseases. With chronic inflammatory diseases posing such a large and growing disease burden, the new centre is well placed pave the way for more effective and targeted treatments.

“Alongside exceptional scientific leadership linking two world-leading centres, and strong partnerships with patients and digital health innovators, the scientists’ commitment to the next generation of researchers will embed UK leadership in this field, with long-term potential to deliver a transformative, global impact for health.”

Supplements can boost longevity, reduce inflammation, and aid in strength training. They can also improve cardiovascular health, according to a heart transplant cardiologist.

Dr. Dmitry Yaranov, the director of the advanced heart failure program at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, told Business Insider that being a cardiologist makes him extra aware of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the US.

“I’m always very conscious about my diet,” Yaranov said, and that includes supplements to support his heart health. At the same time, he said the list of supplements he takes is “not long,” as he tries to focus on supplements that have more research behind them.

Supplements “support a healthy lifestyle, but they don’t replace a healthy lifestyle,” Yaranov said, emphasizing the importance of practicing heart-healthy habits like regular exercise and a balanced diet. “I think that a lot of times, my patients forget about that.”

Omega-3 reduces the risk of blood clots

Of all the supplements he takes, Yaranov said that omega-3 has the most research backing its heart health benefits.

Found in foods like salmon, anchovies, soybeans, and walnuts, omega-3 helps support healthy blood cells, reducing the risk of blood clots. It also helps to lower triglyceride levels, a type of fat that can cause plaque buildup in the arteries and eventually lead to a stroke, heart attack, or heart disease.

“I know that for sure, I’m not getting enough fresh, fatty fish in my diet,” Yaranov said, which is why he’s been taking omega-3 supplements for years.

Magnesium glycinate improves sleep

Magnesium supports heart, bone, brain, and muscle health, controlling processes like blood pressure. It can naturally be found in foods like spinach and black beans, but up to 15% of Americans are magnesium-deficient.

Yaranov emphasized that he checks his magnesium levels every six months to a year through bloodwork, since “certain levels of magnesium are dangerous for the heart.” Taking too much magnesium can lead to irregular heart rhythms and even cardiac arrest. He said cardiologists recommend keeping magnesium near 2.0-2.2 mg/dL, especially in patients with heart disease.

Getting his bloodwork done also helped him find the right type of magnesium for his body. Yaranov takes magnesium glycinate, which promotes better sleep than other forms of magnesium due to the presence of glycine, an amino acid with calming qualities. Prior to taking it, he tried magnesium oxide, citrate, and salts, but they either didn’t improve his levels or upset his stomach.

That “eventually will feed into cardiovascular health,” as poor sleep negatively impacts the heart, he said. He also works out five days a week and sweats a lot, which can deplete the body’s magnesium levels.

Vitamin D may prevent heart disease

Vitamin D is associated with a lower risk of heart attack in adults over 60. While more research is needed on the exact benefits vitamin D has on the heart, many researchers and clinicians believe there’s no harm in supplementing with vitamin D, especially when it has other proven perks like helping the body absorb calcium and boosting the immune system. (While it’s technically possible to overdose on vitamin D, it usually happens when people take more than their recommended value of vitamin D supplements.)

Vitamin D can be found through sun exposure and foods like fatty fish and milk. Yaranov said he spends “a long time indoors,” which can contribute to vitamin D deficiency. When he learned his levels were low, he added vitamin D to his list of daily supplements.

Information on mobility, phone usage, sleep-wake patterns, and other passive data collected by smartphones is associated with behavioral markers linked to multiple forms of psychopathology, including general mental health burden, new research showed.

In a large observational study of community-based adults, researchers found that smartphone sensors that measure daily activities captured distinct behavioral signatures that may help identify when mental health symptoms are worsening.

The findings add to a growing body of work on digital phenotyping, which analyzes passive data collected by smartphones and wearables to identify behavioral patterns in real time.

Although not ready for the clinic, researchers said the new analysis suggests a number of potential applications for smartphone sensing, which could be used alongside clinician-rated and self-reported measures, offering moment-by-moment insight into patients’ lived experience and an opportunity for timely intervention.

“This study helps us understand the breadth of psychopathology that smartphone sensors can detect and how specific those markers are to different forms of mental illness,” lead author Whitney R. Ringwald, PhD, assistant professor and Starke Hathaway Endowed Chair in Clinical Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, told Medscape Medical News.

“It offers a way to assess psychological functioning in daily life and monitor mental health symptoms more continuously, especially outside the clinic setting,” she added.

The study was published online on July 3 in JAMA Network Open.

Linking Data to Symptoms

Until now, behavioral studies utilizing smartphone data were typically small and focused on a single disorder like depression or schizophrenia. But that approach may overlook how symptoms interact and overlap across diagnostic boundaries, researchers said.

To capture a fuller picture, Ringwald and colleagues used the hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology, a framework that organizes mental health symptoms into transdiagnostic domains. These include internalizing, detachment, somatoform, antagonism, disinhibition, and thought disorder.

“One of the major contributions of the study is that earlier research has looked at only a few DSM [diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders] disorders,” Ringwald said. “We took a wider view by measuring symptom dimensions that span most forms of psychopathology and used a much larger sample.”

The cross-sectional study enrolled 557 adults (83% women; mean age, 30.7 years; 81% White individuals). Participants completed a baseline mental health survey, which investigators used to calculate a general measure of overall psychiatric symptom burden, called a p-factor.

They then underwent 15 days of smartphone-based monitoring. Their personal devices collected data via global positioning system (GPS), accelerometer, screen use, call logs, and battery metrics.

Researchers extracted 27 behavioral markers from the data, such as time spent at home (from GPS data) and sleep duration (from accelerometer data).

They then mapped these markers to participants’ scores across psychopathology domains, measuring the strength of the association by the coefficient of multiple correlation (R) between each of the six domains and the 27 markers.

Identifying Patterns

Detachment (R, 0.42; 95% CI, 0.29-0.54) and somatoform (R, 0.41; 95% CI, 0.30-0.53) symptoms showed the strongest associations. High detachment was linked to such behavioral markers as reduced walking, more time at home, and fewer locations visited.

Somatoform symptoms, which are often overlooked in mobile sensing studies, were similarly tied to low physical activity.

Other associations included low battery charge in individuals with high disinhibition — which researchers suggest may reflect planning deficits — and fewer, shorter phone calls among those with elevated antagonism. Internalizing symptoms had subtler links, including briefer, more frequent screen interactions.

The researchers also correlated behavioral patterns with participants’ baseline p-factor. Those with higher baseline p-factor scores were more likely to have sensor data that revealed reduced mobility (standardized β, -0.22; 95% CI, -0.32 to -0.12), later bedtimes (standardized β, 0.25; 95% CI, 0.11-0.38), more time spent at home (standardized β, 0.23; 95% CI, 0.14-0.32), and lower phone battery levels (standardized β, -0.16; 95% CI, -0.30 to -0.01).

These patterns, the authors suggest, may reflect shared impairments in motivation, planning, or cognitive control across multiple forms of mental illness. If validated, such behavioral indicators could help clinicians recognize when symptoms are escalating, even in the absence of a clear diagnostic label.

Digital Phenotyping: Another Clinical Tool?

Although not ready for clinical use, the findings point to several promising applications.

If integrated into care, smartphone sensing could help providers passively track symptoms that could indicate relapse, allowing clinicians to deliver timely interventions based on real-world behavior. This could be especially valuable for patients who struggle to report changes or have limited access to care, researchers said.

“It’s not a replacement for clinical care, but a potential complement that gives us a richer picture,” Ringwald said.

She noted that digital phenotyping could eventually support just-in-time interventions — for example, prompting a brief therapeutic strategy when a person shows signs of behavioral withdrawal or disruption.

Ringwald emphasized that important steps remain before the technology is ready to be implemented.

“This is still early-stage research,” she said. “We need larger, more diverse samples, better sensor calibration, and strategies for interpreting data at the individual level before we can integrate this into care.”

Promise and Precautions

In an accompanying editorial, Christian A. Webb, PhD, and Hadar Fisher, PhD, both of Harvard Medical School in Boston, described the study as “an important contribution to the growing field of digital phenotyping.”

The research “demonstrates the potential value of this approach, linking everyday behaviors to transdiagnostic symptom dimensions,” they wrote.

They cautioned, however, that behavioral data should not be overinterpreted.

“Digital behavioral data are just that — behavioral. They are rough proxies for internal mental states, not direct readouts of mood or thought,” the authors wrote.

A single signal could carry different meanings depending on context. “The same signal could reflect intense physical activity, fear, or excitement.” 

To be clinically useful, they added, the technology must be accurate, scalable, and ethically implemented.

“The dream is scalable, low-burden, personalized care that meets people where they are,” Webb and Fisher wrote. “If we can get the science and safeguards right, smartphones may become not only ubiquitous in our pockets but also invaluable in our clinical toolkits.”

This study was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Ringwald and coauthors reported no relevant financial relationships. Webb was supported in part by the Tommy Fuss Fund and reported no relevant disclosures. Fisher reported no conflicts of interest.