As wildfire smoke fills the skies from Seattle to Spain, public health researchers at Fred Hutch Cancer Center are sharing tools they hope will help people in the Pacific Northwest (and beyond) literally breathe easier.
Researchers in the Geospatial Exposome Lab (geoexlab), led by Fred Hutch epidemiologist Trang VoPham, PhD, MPH, MS, have developed two public-focused health platforms to help counteract air pollution.
Their free web app geoexmap lets individuals map their own neighborhoods’ environmental exposures and health data, while their new digital health intervention provides susceptible patients with air pollution exposure mitigation strategies during wildfire season via their Epic electronic health record, or EHR.
“Wildfires are a major source of outdoor air pollution,” VoPham said. “Air pollution is very harmful and has been linked with many diseases including certain cancers, heart disease and stroke.”
The new tools also provide tips to stay healthy despite looming environmental risks.
“Our lab is actively pursuing work that uses geospatial science, or location-based data and technologies, to translate knowledge generated from epidemiologic studies on etiology or risk factors to develop population-level disease control and prevention solutions,” VoPham said.
Easy, affordable ways to help you breathe easier when air quality is poor.
Breatheasy.tips provides guidance from major medical and scientific societies including the American Thoracic Society and the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, classified air pollution as a carcinogen in 2013, and multiple studies have since pointed to the association between air pollution and the risk of lung, bladder, breast and other cancers. But air pollution also increases risk for heart disease and stroke.
And climate change is making it worse.
According to the nonprofit Climate Central, individual exposure to harmful wildfire smoke in the U.S. was four times higher during the years 2020 to 2024, on average each year, than during all the years between 2006 and 2019. And a 2025 study in Nature pointed to the importance of early warning systems like the one VoPham and her team created, concluding that “accurate air-quality forecasting and pollution alert systems may be quick and cost-effective options for reducing human exposure to wildfire smoke.”
“Climate change has resulted in increasing wildfires, which are a major source of fine particulate matter air pollution,” said VoPham, who was named Geospatial World Rising Star Award in 2024. “These tiny particles of pollution ― known as PM2.5 ― are a known risk factor for respiratory events, and interventions are needed to protect public health.”
PM2.5 particles measure less than 2.5 microns across (about one-thirtieth the width of an average human hair), but they do a lot of damage. VoPham said these airborne particles given off by wildfires, industrial processes and vehicle traffic are especially harmful to humans as they can penetrate deep into the lungs, seep into the bloodstream and even show up in your brain, causing inflammation, oxidative stress and other downstream effects which can drive disease.
And not just new cancers; wildfire smoke and other air pollution can increase cancer survivors’ risk of death.
Last October, VoPham and a team of researchers from Fred Hutch, the University of Washington, the University of British Columbia, Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and AccuWeather, published a study in Cancer Epidemiology showing the harm wildfire smoke can trigger in cancer survivors.
Using cancer registry data, they tracked the outcomes of more than 7 million cancer patients diagnosed between 2000 and 2021, estimating exposure to PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (another common air pollutant), ozone and the incidence of wildfires using high-resolution geospatial datasets. Their findings showed a clear association between higher exposure to wildfires and PM2.5 and an increased risk for mortality.
“Among patients diagnosed with cancer, PM2.5 air pollution, particularly in areas heavily impacted by wildfires, is associated with an increased risk for cancer mortality,” VoPham concluded. Wildfire smoke does other damage, though.
― Fred Hutch epidemiologist and geoexlab principal investigator Dr. Trang VoPham
To help counteract that damage, VoPham’s geoexlab launched a digital health intervention that provides vulnerable patients ― those with breathing issues from asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) ― with information on how to protect themselves during wildfire season.
They partnered with UW Medicine’s Digital Health Office and Information Technology Services to use Epic electronic health records for the project. (Epic is the EHR software used by hospitals, health systems and patients, who connect to it via MyChart.) Roll-out began in June 2025, timed to the wildfire season in Washington state. The intervention is now in its second year.
“The team at UW Medicine were fabulous,” VoPham said. “We provided them with a data set of ZIP codes associated with really high levels of air pollution and that data set was ingested into the Epic system.”
Epic then identified at-risk adult UW Medicine patients who lived in the highly polluted ZIP codes, which was determined by linking patient ZIP codes in the EHR with high-resolution satellite-based geospatial data on PM2.5.
“Then we sent outreach through emails, text messages and patient portals to more than 64,000 high-risk patients aged 18 years and older living in high-PM2.5 neighborhoods,” VoPham said.
Messages focused on how air pollution can worsen asthma and COPD symptoms and included a link to the site breatheasy.tips, created by VoPham and her team. The site features practical, cost-effective and evidence-based strategies for protecting vulnerable lungs from air pollution, such as tracking the Air Quality Index, or AQI, building a portable air cleaner or wearing N95 masks. Patients were also sent a link to schedule a same-day virtual or telehealth appointment with a primary care provider if their asthma or COPD symptoms were worsening.
“We successfully demonstrated a new scalable approach to put information about how to protect yourself from air pollution into the hands of the people who will benefit from it the most,” VoPham said. “And we timed it to when the information was the most critical ― during wildfire season ― empowering people to make informed decisions about their health.”
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Wildfire smoke and air pollution can also damage healthy lungs. But not all of it is as clearly visible as the smoke over New York City and Chicago right now.
That’s why VoPham and her lab created geoexmap.
“It stands for geospatial exposome map which is geospatial, or location-based information, combined with exposome information, or the totality of environmental exposures that we experience across the life course,” VoPham said.
Malia Cortez, MS, a research assistant in geoexlab, acted as lead data engineer for the project, assisted by former Fred Hutch community outreach and engagement specialist Sam Chao. According to Cortez, the tool taps into a slew of health and environmental data for all of Washington state, the catchment area served by Fred Hutch.
“Ones of the goals of geoexmap is to help people learn more about the neighborhoods they live in or the neighborhoods they serve,” Cortez said. “We aimed to make this web app user-friendly, make it visually appealing and to provide a great user experience.”
The app features user-centered functionalities like mapping, customizable graphs and tables, data importing and exporting, and neighborhood search. But it’s not for individuals alone. VoPham said groups like the Fred Hutch/University of Washington/Seattle Children’s Cancer Consortium’s Office of Community Outreach & Engagement, or OCOE, can also use geoexmap to “monitor cancer burden in Washington state and plan targeted interventions.”
The app enables the visualization of numerous neighborhood-level health and environmental data to better characterize and understand the Washington state catchment area population, health disparities and underserved communities.
VoPham said the lab used a community-engaged approach to developing geoexmap, incorporating valuable input from community members and organizations via Fred Hutch’s various community coalitions.
“We’ve been able to learn more about each community’s lived experiences, their needs, challenges and priorities, how these communities would use geoexmap, and the data that they would like to see to best support their work,” she said. “We have prioritized making sure that all communities served in the Fred Hutch catchment area have a voice in geoexmap decision making.”
Beyond mapping data, geoexmap provides practical and actionable health and prevention tips for each risk variable. Those mapping their neighborhood’s radon levels can click on the “Tips” button and learn how to get free radon test kits to lower their lung cancer risk (radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer). Those mapping neighborhood-level health insurance coverage can view resources for how to apply for Apple Health, Washington state’s Medicaid program.
Even better, geoexmap can capture and provide visualizations of health and environmental data anywhere in the country.
“We used open-source code and publicly available data sets for this project,” VoPham said. “So other cancer centers and institutions can adopt these methods to create their own geoexmap should they want to.”
In addition to pollution, the app maps temperature and proximity to both green spaces (think parks and recreation areas) and blue spaces like lakes and other bodies of water.
“There is also sociodemographic data such as total population, age, sex, race and ethnicity,” said Chao. “When it comes to the natural environment, we include data on ozone, flood hazard areas, dew point, temperature, precipitation, and others.”
The aim is to provide various categories of data from which people can pick and choose.
“People can overlay different layers,” Cortez said. “They can use it to see not just one exposure, but several exposures that wouldn’t easily be found otherwise.”
The digital health intervention and geoexmap were supported by the Dillon Family Foundation.
Diane Mapes is a senior editor and writer at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, who's written for NBC News, TODAY, CNN, MSN, Seattle Magazine and other publications. A breast cancer survivor and patient advocate, you can reach her at dmapes@fredhutch.org or doublewhammied.com / @double_whammied / @doublewhammied.bsky.social. Just diagnosed and need information and resources? Visit our Patient Care page.
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