Findings from health population studies are important sources of information for evidence-based medicine and, by extension, policy makers. These studies monitor key health parameters in representative cross-sections of the population, with the ultimate goal of improving health outcomes. Their data curation is optimized for established health metrics, whereas unannotated metrics—such as unidentified metabolomics features—are less suitable.
As a result, the information-dense data sets from untargeted LC-HRMS biomonitoring are not fully utilized in today’s population studies. We present a scalable solution, “digital biobanks,” which enables the use of the full extent of information from untargeted biomonitoring within established population studies. By adding untargeted data on environmental pollutants, drugs, and unidentified chemicals to health population studies, we can further uncover how the exposome impacts human health.
In this seminar talk, I will present examples of how digital biobanks can improve forensic services and data-driven health research. We have developed two digital biobanks, one from forensic drug screening (ScreenDB, DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.2c03769) and more recently, a metabolomics-based digital biobank from a case-cohort study with information from 1000 population study participants.
Marie Mardal is an Associate Professor of Forensic Toxicology at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and a researcher at the Arctic University of Norway (Norway). After completing her PhD in Clinical Toxicology at Saarland University (Germany) as part of the EU-funded SEWPROF project, she has worked on drug screening and digitization of forensic laboratories, with a focus on how historic analytical data can improve forensic services. Additionally, she is the Principal Investigator of the TROMBOLOME research project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (USD 1.3 mio).