Dr. Chapkin presents an invited webinar on “Personalized nutrition using microbial metabolite phenotype to stratify participants”. This presentation also features a discussion on host exfoliomics (host mRNAs isolated from the fecal stream) that reveal the effects of dietary fiber in a clinical trial.
Texas A&M AgriLife Research Professor Robert Chapkin, Ph.D., College Station, has made outstanding contributions to the areas of precision nutrition and stem cell biology, cancer chemoprevention and the development of noninvasive predictive biomarkers. Chapkin carries the title of Distinguished Professor in the Texas A&M University Department of Nutrition. He holds the Allen Endowed Chair in Nutrition & Chronic Disease Prevention, and he is a University Faculty Fellow, a Regents Fellow and an AgriLife Senior Faculty Fellow.
His achievements, in concert with innovation in basic research, have propelled Chapkin to securing unprecedented funding from the National Institutes of Health – National Cancer Institute. He serves as the co-director of a major NCI grant to conduct training on nutrition, biostatistics and bioinformatics. He is also an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow.
Chapkin has published 271 peer-reviewed manuscripts, 27 book chapters and 305 abstracts, and is listed as co-inventor on three patents. His publications have been cited more than 16,000 times, demonstrating his influence in the fields of nutrition, cancer biology and computational biology.
He has mentored 15 master’s of science degree students and 24 doctoral students in biology, biochemistry and biophysics, nutrition, genetics, toxicology, biotechnology and molecular medicine, all in addition to mentoring 26 post-doctoral fellows.
Visit Chapkin’s profile page with the Texas A&M University Department of Nutrition.
“We are pleased to announce the publication of our recent paper on membrane therapy. The paper is highlighted in the American Society of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Today and can now be accessed online”. Fuentes JLR 2021, Supplemental Material .
“You can read the article about our recent paper in the Journal of Lipid Research using the link below”.
https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/060121/researchers-target-cell-membrane-for-cancer-resear
For the last 32 years, Robert Chapkin, Ph.D., Texas A&M Department of Nutrition Distinguished professor, Allen Endowed Chair in Nutrition & Chronic Disease Prevention and National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award Recipient, College Station, has conducted revolutionary work around noninvasive means of investigating and modeling the role of nutrition in infant development into adulthood. His team’s discovery of what has become known as the “exfoliome,” as well as studies of the gut microbiome in infants, has changed the way in which science investigates nutritional impacts in humans.
The lack of a noninvasive approach to repeatedly access tissue along the intestinal tract has hampered researchers’ ability to study normal gut development and clinical responses to dietary or medical interventions. Thus, Chapkin spearheaded the discovery of the field of noninvasive precision exfoliomics — development of mRNA-based biomarkers using stool derived exfoliated cells shed from the neonatal and adult intestinal tract. This transformative body of work has enabled big-data applications in precision analysis of gut microbe (prokaryotic) and host (eukaryotic) crosstalk in response to diet and chronic disease risk.
Understanding the specifics of gut microbes through advanced phenotyping opens the door to explore precision therapies to improve human health on an individualized basis.
This discovery method has impacted our understanding of neonatal and early childhood development in relation to diet, particularly in studying the effects of breast milk vs. formula. At the same time, it has opened the doors to exploring host-microbe crosstalk and has allowed us to better understand the role diet plays in colon cancer prevention.
The noninvasive approach was used in a previous study to examine diet and microbes as modifiers to stem cell homeostasis and colon cancer in mice. The results demonstrated that long-chain omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil have synergistic effects when combined with dietary fiber or curcumin, which is found in turmeric, in dramatically reducing colon cancer risk by selectively destroying damaged stem cells through a process called ferroptosis.
These preclinical findings suggest that a pescatarian vegetarian diet (high in omega-3 fatty acids and fiber) might help lower the risk of colon cancer in humans by destroying cancer stem cells before they have the chance to replicate. This project has since moved to the clinical research stage thanks to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant in collaboration with the Fred Hutchison Cancer Center in Seattle, WA.
Chapkin Lab is pleased to announce the funding of a new grant!
Attempts to target aberrant Wnt signaling using drugs still face multiple hurdles due to poor tumor cell targeting, negative side effects associated with required long-term treatments and a poor understanding of the mechanisms of action. Consequently, there is an urgent need to further assess non-toxic Wnt targeted therapeutic approaches. This recently funded NIH grant proposal seeks to develop novel membrane targeted therapeutic approaches to abate abnormal Wnt signaling in the colon.