Pharma-Nutrition

Natural products and functional/medical foods are now widely acknowledged as having an effect on the microbiome of the intestine, which in turn influences the outcome of certain disease. This book reviews the impact and effects of natural products and functional/medical foods (nutritional programming) on disease management, specifically focusing on diseases related to 1) Inflammation and Immunity, 2) Cancer, COPD and Cachexia, 3) Allergy and 4) Brain Neuro/Immune. Hippocrates said 'let medicine be thy food and food be thy medicine'. While most of us are familiar with Hippocrates famous words, we admit that in recent times, the disciplines of pharma and nutrition have evolved separately. Today, with the ever growing burden of diseases in modern society, we see a convergence of the two in relation to specific disease prevention and treatment. This re-discovered common ground between the complementary values of pharma and nutrition can be conceptualized in the term pharma-nutrition. Various chapters in the book review the aspects of molecular characteristics of food ingredients towards clinical effectiveness and relevance.

Dr. G. Folkerts started his career in the Rudolf Magnus Institute for Pharmacology at the Utrecht University. He did his thesis on viral infections and asthma and is appointed as full professor (Chair COPD and In Vivo Pharmacology) in the division of Pharmacology, Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Sciences. He spent some time at the University of Edmonton (Canada), the Wellcome Research Institute in Beckenham (UK) and Janssen Research Foundation in Beerse (Belgium). He has successfully guided a great number of research projects concerning inflammatory diseases. These activities have resulted in more than 160 scientific publications in well-respected international journals. He is a full-time professor at the Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is also an associated editor of The European Journal of Pharmacology and is CEO of the contract research company Curax BV.

Dr. Johan Garssen studied medicine and biology at the Free University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He specialized in immunology and pharmacology. He completed his PhD thesis at the University of Utrecht on the role of T cells in respiratory allergy, an immunopharmacological approach. This PhD program was partly performed at Yale University, New Haven, USA. After a postdoc period, he became senior scientist at the National Institute of Public Health in the Netherlands. There he coached many research projects, both preclinical as well as clinical research, in the field of immunomodulation induced by a.o. nutritional ingredients, drugs and environmental agents. He became head of the immunology section at Numico-Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands and director of the immunology platform of Nutricia Research (formerly Numico and Danone), medical nutrition and infant nutrition. He now is a full professor in immunopharmacology at the Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Utrecht University and has been nominated University Profiling Professor Immunopharmacology. Additionally, he has published more than 370 peer reviewed papers in the field of immunomodulation.