19 - Harnessing personalized nutrigenomics for cancer prevention and treatment through diet-gene interaction

Abstract

The field of nutrigenomics involves the interactions of diet, nutritional status, and genes in an individual. Although the studies uncovering the association of nutrigenomics and cancer incidence and/or prevention are still in their infancy, the advent of cutting-edge OMICS technologies has the potential to unlock a whole new window of opportunity that holds the promise to modify risk factors and improve cancer outcomes by diet modifications. In the pregenomic era, nutrition was thought to be universally applicable to human subjects, assuming that all individuals of a certain age and/or in a gender group have the same nutritional requirements. However, there has been a paradigm shift in our understanding aided by the large-scale genome sequence analysis. That shift is that the unique genomic signature of each individual may play a pivotal role in determining the personalized nutritional status and requirements while not all individuals respond similarly to nutritional therapy. With further research, once the detailed mechanisms of the link between genes and nutrients are established, this may lay the foundation for personalized nutritional therapy for cancer prevention and treatment.