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Review
. 2023 Jul 3;15(13):3019.
doi: 10.3390/nu15133019.

Dietary Plant Polysaccharides for Cancer Prevention: Role of Immune Cells and Gut Microbiota, Challenges and Perspectives

Anqi Wang  1 , Ying Liu  1 , Shan Zeng  2 , Yuanyuan Liu  2 , Wei Li  1 , Dingtao Wu  3 , Xu Wu  4 , Liang Zou  3 , Huijuan Chen  5
Affiliations
Review

Dietary Plant Polysaccharides for Cancer Prevention: Role of Immune Cells and Gut Microbiota, Challenges and Perspectives

Anqi Wang et al. Nutrients. .

Abstract

Dietary plant polysaccharides, one of the main sources of natural polysaccharides, possess significant cancer prevention activity and potential development value in the food and medicine fields. The anti-tumor mechanisms of plant polysaccharides are mainly elaborated from three perspectives: enhancing immunoregulation, inhibiting tumor cell growth and inhibiting tumor cell invasion and metastasis. The immune system plays a key role in cancer progression, and immunomodulation is considered a significant pathway for cancer prevention or treatment. Although much progress has been made in revealing the relationship between the cancer prevention activity of polysaccharides and immunoregulation, huge challenges are still met in the research and development of polysaccharides. Results suggest that certain polysaccharide types and glycosidic linkage forms significantly affect the biological activity of polysaccharides in immunoregulation. At present, the in vitro anti-tumor effects and immunoregulation of dietary polysaccharides are widely reported in articles; however, the anti-tumor effects and in vivo immunoregulation of dietary polysaccharides are still deserving of further investigation. In this paper, aspects of the mechanisms behind dietary polysaccharides' cancer prevention activity achieved through immunoregulation, the role of immune cells in cancer progression, the role of the mediatory relationship between the gut microbiota and dietary polysaccharides in immunoregulation and cancer prevention are systematically summarized, with the aim of encouraging future research on the use of dietary polysaccharides for cancer prevention.

Keywords: cancer prevention; chemical structure; dietary plant polysaccharides; gut microbiota; immune cells; immune regulation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Scheme of dietary plant polysaccharide interaction with gut microbiota and immune cells for cancer prevention (I, dietary plant polysaccharides with mass molecules are often not easily absorbed by the human body, and they are often used as important materials for gut microbes and are widely metabolized into small molecules; II, some metabolites (such as SCFAs, BAs, LPS and indoles) produced by gut microbes directly interact with the immune cells in the gut or are released into the blood to indirectly exert their immunoregulatory activity; III, some cytokines (such as TNF-α, INF-γ, IL-1β and IL-10) secreted by the gut immune cells transfer to the blood to exert their immunoregulatory and cancer prevention activities; IV, evidence also supports the notion that some bioactive dietary plant polysaccharides with small molecules are effective in immunoregulation and cancer prevention, and this is also considered another one of their actions).
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Grants and funding

This work was funded by the Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2021YFH0169, 2022YFS0581), the Sichuan Science and Technology Plan Key Project (2020YFN0152), The Special Project of the Central Government for Guiding Local Science and Technology Development of Sichuan Province (2022ZYD0083) and the Key R&D Program in Sichuan Province (2021YFS0042).

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