Mary Playdon Receives National Cancer Institute Funding for Cancer Prevention Research
Highlights
- Mary Playdon, PhD, MPH, received National Cancer Institute support for three research projects focused on cancer prevention.
- The projects examine meal timing, diet-driven inflammation, obesity-related cancers and the potential role of weight loss medications in cancer prevention.
- Playdon’s research focuses on nutritional epidemiology, metabolomics, diet, obesity and cancer risk.
Mary Playdon, PhD, MPH, associate professor in the Department of Nutrition and Integrative Physiology at the University of Utah and an investigator in Cancer Control and Population Sciences at Huntsman Cancer Institute, has received support for three National Cancer Institute-funded research projects focused on cancer prevention. Together, the projects explore how diet, meal timing, inflammation, obesity and metabolism may influence the risk of developing common cancers, including breast, endometrial and colorectal cancers.
The first project, “Chrono-Cuisine: Investigating Meal Timing Patterns and Cancer Susceptibility,” will study whether when people eat may affect cancer risk. Regulating the timing of meals and snacks to better align with the body’s circadian clock is emerging as a promising strategy to improve metabolic health, but large population studies often do not collect detailed meal timing data.
Playdon’s team will work to identify blood-based biomarkers of meal timing patterns and study how those markers relate to breast, endometrial and colorectal cancer risk in large U.S. cohorts.
The second project, “Targeting Diet-Driven Inflammation for Colorectal Cancer Prevention in High-Risk Adults: A Biomarker-Guided Approach,” focuses on the connection between diet, inflammation and colorectal cancer. The study will evaluate a blood-based biomarker score designed to measure the inflammatory potential of a person’s diet. Researchers hope the tool can eventually help identify people at higher risk for colorectal cancer due to diet-related inflammation and guide more personalized nutrition strategies to reduce that risk.
Playdon is also contributing to “Incretin Mimetics for Intercepting Obesity-Related Cancers: Effects and Underlying Mechanisms,” a National Cancer Institute-funded project led by Stephen D. Hursting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That study will examine whether incretin mimetics, a class of weight loss medications that includes semaglutide and tirzepatide, may help reduce the development or progression of obesity-related cancers. The project will study endometrial and colorectal cancers in both mouse models and humans to better understand how these medications may affect metabolism, immune function and cancer risk.
Across all three projects, Playdon’s work aims to answer practical questions about how nutrition and metabolism can be used to prevent cancer. Her research uses metabolomics, the study of small molecules in blood and tissue, to better understand how dietary patterns and obesity-related metabolic changes may influence cancer development. By identifying measurable biological markers of diet, meal timing and inflammation, Playdon’s work could help move cancer prevention toward more precise, personalized and evidence-based recommendations.
