Recent Advances in Nutrigenomics: Patent Applications

Nutrition and dietary habits are investigated as environmental factors in cancer development and a strong relationship has been found between diet and cancer. Nutrients affect gene expression, gene regulation and eventually individuals’ genome. Genes related to carcinogen metabolism, steroid hormone metabolism and DNA repair are involved in cancer progress. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the factors affecting the change in cancer-related genes. Nutrigenomics is a new multidisciplinary field, investigating the effect of nutrients on genome and its expression through molecular techniques. Nutrigenomics enables to unveil how nutrients regulate cellular metabolism via gene and protein expressions and provide information on the functions of genome. The resulting differences or similarities in gene expressions as response to diets, will enable to understand diet-gene interactions at personalized levels that will implement the concept of personalized nutrition. The genetic variations among individuals will explain the health and disease status of human to be used to determine the cancer risk of individuals. In this chapter, it is aimed to review nutrient-cancer interaction, nutrigenomics approaches and patents related to the implications of nutrigenomics in cancer treatments.

Keywords: Bioenergetic capacity, cancer, cancer prevention, diagnostics, diet, epigenetics, food components, genome stability, metabolic syndrome, metabolism, nutraceuticals, nutrients, nutrigenomics, nutrition, patent, personalized nutrition, predictive markers, single nucleotide polymorphism, well-being.