Informatics for Nutritional Genetics and Genomics

Current challenges and future implications of exploiting the omics data into nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics for personalized diagnosis and nutrition-based care

Nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics, combined with the omics technologies, are a demanding and an increasingly important field in personalizing nutrition-based care to understand an individual's response to nutrition-guided therapy. Omics is defined as the analysis of the large data sets of the biological system featuring transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics and providing new insights into cell regulation. The effect of combining nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics with omics will give insight into molecular analysis, as human nutrition requirements vary per individual. Omics measures modest intraindividual variability and is critical to exploit these data for use in the development of precision nutrition. Omics, combined with nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics, is instrumental in the creation of goals for improving the accuracy of nutrition evaluations. Although dietary-based therapies are provided for various clinical conditions such as inborn errors of metabolism, limited advancement has been done to expand the omics data for a more mechanistic understanding of cellular networks dependent on nutrition-based expression and overall regulation of genes. The greatest challenge remains in the clinical sector to integrate the current data available, overcome the well-established limits of self-reported methods in research, and provide omics data, combined with nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics research, for each individual. Hence, the future seems promising if a design for personalized, nutrition-based diagnosis and care can be implemented practically in the health care sector.

Nutrition during childhood cancer treatment: current understanding and a path for future research

Proper nutritional status during cancer therapy has been recognised as being integral to a variety of health outcome measures, including overall survival, treatment tolerance, and quality of life. The prevalence of malnutrition, defined by WHO as either undernutrition or overnutrition, among children and adolescents with cancer is reported to be as high as 75%. Yet, over the past two decades there have been limited advances in elucidating the underlying pathophysiological drivers of malnutrition in this population. This effect has resulted in a paucity of research aimed at improving nutritional assessment and intervention among this group. This Review presents an in-depth discussion of the role of nutritional status in paediatric cancer care, as well as evolving avenues of investigation that might propel personalised nutrition into a viable reality. Thus, nutritional science might facilitate individualised intervention strategies, and thereby help to optimise clinical outcomes for patients and survivors of childhood cancer.