Establishing a Tracking Methodology To Determine Food-and-Health Links
COS/BioE Professor Jing-Ke Weng received funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts 2024 Innovation Fund to develop a methodology that will precisely trace food molecules as they travel through the human body to better understand food-host interactions and apply that knowledge to disease prevention and treatment.
Jing-Ke Weng, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and bioengineering, was named one of 16 researchers to The Pew Charitable Trusts’ 2024 class of Innovation Fund, which supports scientific collaboration of its biomedical program alumni who are addressing some of the most pressing challenges facing human health.
Weng, a Pew Scholar since 2014, was named an Innovation Fund investigator with Seth Rakoff-Nahoum, M.D., and associate professor in the division of infectious disease at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, on the project, “Redefining the Link Between Food and Human Health.”
The two researchers, who are receiving $270,000 in funding, plan to precisely trace food molecules’ pathways, modifications, and host interactions and explore a person’s immune response to food proteins.
“The goal is to create a methodology for tracking diverse food molecules through their interactions with the human body, which has never been established,” Weng says.
Their work is aimed at expanding the current knowledge of food beyond nutritional values to include food-host interactions, with the potential to inform disease prevention and treatment, and fundamentally transform approaches to global health.
“What you find on a food nutrition label is information like grams of carbohydrates and proteins, but in reality, the actual chemical composition of food is exceedingly complex,” Weng says. “Food is essentially millions of small molecules, with probably tens of thousands of different proteins, and it is usually coated with microbes.”
The food-and-health link is impacted by many variables, from where food is grown and how it is handled to a person’s overall health and immune system status.
To focus their efforts, Weng and Rakoff-Nahoum will draw on their expertise in immunology and plant chemistry. They will track specific metabolites and proteins in plant foods by incorporating a stable isotope of carbon (carbon-13) into their molecular structures. This isotopic labeling does not meaningfully alter the chemical properties of the molecules or affect the plant foods’ taste. Instead, it provides a distinct “signature” that enables the researchers to follow these compounds as they progress through the gastrointestinal tract.
The tracker will show researchers specific locations where a food protein-host interaction triggers a negative response, such as toxicity, inflammation or other allergic reactions. As there are different proteins and microbes throughout the path—microbes in the mouth differ from those in the colon, for example—pinpointing location can help determine what specific molecules within the body are contributing to negative food reactions.
While this project can contribute important data to food allergy research, it can also help create an improved definition of healthy eating based not only on nutritional characteristics but on interactions and reactions between an individual and food, Weng says.
“To put this in a bigger context, we are trying to understand what people are really eating and how that translates into a health outcome,” he adds.
Weng and Rakoff-Nahoum have worked on several projects together, having initially met through the Food Allergy Science Initiative (FASI), a nonprofit launched by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to discover the underlying issues to food allergies. “This particular project results from many years of collaboration between our labs,” Weng says.