About this Research Topic
Apart from providing nourishment, food is thought to play an important role in reducing the risk of suffering chronic diseases which have an immunological and metabolic basis and therefore increase the risk of cancer progression and severity. Indeed, food and its constituents can significantly impact immunity as well as functional differentiation of key immunocompetent effectors and modulate gene expression and nutriology processes, which altogether contribute to prevent cellular alterations favoring cell transformation. As such, dietary habits may play a major role in worsening or preventing the onset of immunometabolic illnesses.
As our understanding of nutrition grows, harnessing the implicit role of nutrition in the development of personalized interventions offers the prospect of further enhancing targeted dietary patient immunometabolic needs, to prevent, or at least to restrain, cell stress and tumorigenic activity during disturbed nutrient metabolism. Data suggest that the composition of foods (regardless of energy content), its influence on and interaction with intestinal microbiota, and finally its ‘cross-talk’ with the host’s intestinal immune system, can prove even more relevant determining factors of immunometabolic health. However, a causal association between specific nutrients and cell transformation remains largely inferential.
The main aim of this Research Topic is to gather studies on the role of immunonutrition-based precision strategies in the progression and treatment of cancer. This Research Topic falls into a multidisciplinary approach about the applicability of nutrients and foods with improved nutritional properties to prevent, or at least to restrain, tumorigenic activity during disturbed immune capacity and metabolism. Knowledge of the underlying precise (molecular) mechanisms, as well as ‘omic’ approaches to understand the personal susceptibility and response to specific dietary interventions targeting tumorigenic activity will ultimately result in highly effective approaches for integrative precision translational and transferable nutritional strategies.
Original Research articles and Reviews are welcomed. Subtopics of interest include (but are not limited to):
• Studies targeting nutrient regulation of signaling and transcription factors regulation, functions, and roles in immune-based chronic diseases leading to cancer development
• Immunonutritional agonists (i.e., food ingredients with regulatory roles on important cellular immunometabolic functions) that affect tumorigenic activity
• Integrative assays based on genetic, phenotypic, and environmental information for nutritional recommendations in subjects at risk of cancer
• How nutrients promote and interact with innate immune pathways in cancer prevention or exert essential function as coadjutants for cancer treatments during and after therapy
• Use of metabolomics to understand how the risk and consequences of chemotherapy and cancer can be reduced via immunonutrition-based interventions
• Nutrigenomics to understand diet-based susceptibility to tumorigenic activity
• Interaction between nutrients as well as causality between constituents of the microbiota or derived factors with specific processes affecting tumorigenic activity and aggressiveness, and chemotherapy toxicity
Keywords: Immunonutrition, Cancer, Tumor, Omics, Precision Nutrition
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
