ASAKAWA LAB
浅川研究室

Principal Investigator:
Tomohiro Asakawa(Junior Associate Professor)

Chemical biology study on Functional marine foods
Keywords: marine natural product、chemical biology、organic chemistry
Background and Motivation
I study the potential power of functional marine foods and develop a research program focused on synthesizing molecular tools from the bioactive
compounds found in marine foods.
Dementia and lifestyle-related diseases, of which diabetes is a representative, are increasing problems in many developed countries, including Japan, due tochanges in eating habits and the aging of the population. The growing incidence of these diseases has resulted in increasing medical expenditures, butcurrently there are no effective pharmaceutical treatments for these diseases. For this reason, functional foods are an attractive possibility as an approach topreventive medicine, including traditional foods that have been shown to have a variety of preventive effects. With the recent introduction of the new labelingsystem for ''Foods with Function Claims” by the Ministry of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety, we have entered a time in which scientific evidence forthese food functions is becoming increasingly important.

Originality
I will perform the total synthesis of active compounds from various marine foods, based on the construction of heterocyclic rings and polyphenols using
original methods. Moreover, I will develop these synthetic methods into studies of the structure-activity relationships of these compounds, and I will
efficiently convert the compounds into chemical probes.

Impact and Perspective
My research will contribute to the promotion of human health and to the reduction of medical costs. It will be the foundation of new approaches to validating
the efficacy of healthy foods and compounds. It is now widely recognized that the utilization of commonly-eaten healthy foods is an effective way to preventthe development of many diseases, and in recent years the discovery of new bioactive compounds in such foods has been progressing rapidly. However, formost food compounds, even for those from well-known traditional foods, the clinical evaluation of their utility for human health is still in the beginning stagesof development. There are two major reasons for this. The first is the difficulty of developing large-scale supplies of such compounds, which is required fortheir evaluation. The second is the lack of chemical biological tools that are needed to carry out this kind of evaluation. Thus, potentially important bioactive
compounds often go unevaluated and so are forgotten. My research will be a bridge between the discovery of new compounds and their evaluation by
providing both a large-scale supply of these compounds and the chemical tools required to accurately evaluate them. In this way, my research will contributeto concretely demonstrating the benefits of particular foods for human health, and by extension, to the discovery of potential drug targets.

■ For more information:www.utokai.ac.jp/tuiist/english/tt/announcement_okamura.html■ CONTACT:Tomohiro Asakawa, Ph.D.
Tokai University Institute of Innovative
Science and Technology
3-20-1Orido,Shimizu-ku,Shizuoka-shi,
Shizuoka 424-8610 JAPAN
Phone +81(54)-334-0411 (Ext.2018)
Email t.asakawa@tsc.u-tokai.ac.jp