The Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource: enabling research into the environmental influences on children's health outcomes

Purpose of review The Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) is a new infrastructure supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to expand the ability of children's health researchers to include analysis of environmental exposures in their research and to incorporate the emerging concept of the exposome. Recent findings There is extensive discussion of the potential of the exposome to advance understanding of the totality of environmental influences on human health. Children's health is a logical choice to demonstrate the exposome concept due to the extensive existing knowledge of individual environmental exposures affecting normal health and development and the short latency between exposures and observable phenotypes. Achieving this demonstration will require access to extensive analytical capabilities to measure a suite of exposures through traditional biomonitoring approaches and to cross-validate these with emerging exposomic approaches. Summary CHEAR is a full-service exposure assessment resource, linking up-front consultation with both laboratory and data analysis. Analyses of biological samples are intended to enhance studies by including targeted analysis of specific exposures and untargeted analysis of small molecules associated with phenotypic endpoints. Services provided by CHEAR are made available without cost but require a brief application and adherence to policies detailed on the CHEAR web page at https://chearprogram.org/.