Advancements in molecular biology and the advent of high-throughput
technologies for characterization of biological processes across multiple biological
scales from cells and tissues to the whole organism have provided exciting
opportunities to investigate and evaluate the influence of foods and their bioactive
ingredients on the human health and disease. These advances, mainly developed by
pharmaceutical stakeholders, are going to transform the way nutrition is addressed in
relation to human health by the nutraceutical industry. Consumers now demand
healthier food products and regulatory agencies have raised the bars for approval of
health claims associated with functional foods. To tackle these issues, a knowledgebased,
integrated systems biology strategy is required for successful production of
functional foods, which can be adopted from experiences of pharmaceutical industry in
this area. This strategy benefits from integrative mechanistic modeling of health and
disease processes, which can support the process of health claim substantiation for
bioactive food ingredients in new product development. Currently, there are thousands
of natural compounds or functional food ingredients whose mode-of-action and their
final impact on the human health or disease are unknown. Thus, identification of
biological targets for thousands of bioactive compounds in food and their mode-ofaction
in the human body is of high priority. This chapter discusses how fundamentals
of systems biology and in silico target identification, as is done in the pharmaceutical
industry, can be applied to the field of nutrition in support of developing novel
functional foods. The author foresees that identification of mechanistic targets for
bioactive compounds extracted from foods and natural resources, and explanations for
their pharmacological mode-of-action will play a crucial role in the future of healthcare
and preventive medicine.
Keywords: Functional food, Integrated systems-based strategy, Systems biology,
Target identification.
