EIRENE-AT / Exposome Austria Newsletter | December 2025

Updates
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• Exposome Austria Days 2025: Revisit
  
  
• EIRENE:
  From Preparatory to Implementation Phase
  
  
• Enabling Science: Services Offered
  
  
• ERA Symposium 2025
  
  
• This Year's Awards and Publications
  

Exposome Austria Days 2025: Connecting Disciplines, Inspiring Collaboration

On 23 September, the Exposome Austria Research Infrastructure hosted its second 3-day retreat, this time organized in the historic town of Horn in Lower Austria.

The Symposium & Open Stakeholders Day drew nearly 100 participants and experts from more than 20 countries, all united by a common goal: advancing our understanding of how the environment, diet, lifestyle and other endogenous and exogenous factors shape human health. 

Our researchers presented new methods, pilot studies and user cases. Workshops, poster sessions and an atmospheric cultural programme at Rosenburg Castle fuelled lively exchange — and, most importantly, inspired fresh cross-disciplinary collaborations and set another important milestone in building the national exposome community.

EIRENE: From preparatory towards implementation phase 

Exposome Austria is proud to be one of the founding members of EIRENE, the pan-European ESFRI infrastructure dedicated to human exposome research and environmental assessment. This September, EIRENE completed its Preparatory Phase and is about to enter the Implementation Phase soon.

We are equally proud of our close collaboration with the coordinators of this long-term project at Masaryk University in Brno. One of this team´s representatives, Kateřina Šebková, joined our symposium in Horn, and contributed as one of the panel speakers.

Exposome Austria will continue to work closely with EIRENE and remains fully committed to supporting and shaping this important European initiative.

Enabling Science: Services On The Offer

Over the past year, Exposome Austria expanded both its service capacity and portfolio, strengthening its mission to enable high-quality science.

Five core services in targeted and non-targeted biomonitoring, exposomics, and metabolomics now support a wider range of biological and environmental sample types across institutions. Collaborative pilot studies show- cased real-world applications—from maternal and infant health to international cohorts—and demonstrated successful biomarker extraction from small samples such as dried blood spots.

Interested in details?

Do explore a following video from the Symposium where pilot study authors Simone Bräuer (BOKU) and Sebastian Granitzer (Medical University Vienna) shared their results and the current research progress.

Austrian ERA Symposium 2025: Towards Europe's Fifth Freedom

Representatives of the Exposome Austria – Prof. Benedikt Warth and Jan Stiglitz – once again actively participated in this year’s Austrian ERA Symposium, the annual gathering of the European Research Area community. The 17 November event in Vienna welcomed high-level guests, including Austrian Federal Ministers Eva‑Maria Holzleitner (research, BMFWF) and Peter Hanke (innovation, BMIMI), as well as European Commissioner for Research & Innovation Ekaterina Zaharieva.

This Year´s Awards And Publications

In February 2025, our PhD Student Katharina Pfundt  (supervised by Exposome Austria core team members, Benedikt Warth and Vinicius Verri Hernandes) won the best poster prize at the 35th Mass Spec Forum. 

Besides, one of the Exposome Austria core team, Dr. Vinicius V. Hernandes, published the first results of our research on dried blood spots in Environmental International Journal. 

Review the paper here

Later this year, in October, Prof. Benedikt Warth received the 2025 Recognition Award of the Federal State of Lower Austria for outstanding achievements in exposome science, highlighting the excellence of his team and the Exposome Austria Research Infrastructure.

Read more and watch the video on the Faculty of Chemistry website.