Targeting inflammation and the pathways linking inflammation with cancer is an innovative therapeutic strategy. Tastants are potential candidates for this approach, since taste receptors display various biological functions, including anti-inflammatory activity (AIA). The present study aims to explore the power different tastes have to predict a phytochemical's anti-cancer properties. It also investigates whether anti-inflammatory phytocompounds also have anti-cancer effects, and whether there are tastes that can better predict a phytochemical's bivalent biological activity. Data from the PlantMolecularTasteDB, containing a total of 1527 phytochemicals, were used. Out of these, only 624 phytocompounds met the inclusion criterion of having 40 hits in a PubMed search, using the name of the phytochemical as the keyword. Among them, 461 phytochemicals were found to possess anti-cancer activity (ACA). The AIA and ACA of phytochemicals were strongly correlated, irrespective of taste/orosensation or chemical class. Bitter taste was positively correlated with ACA, while sweet taste was negatively correlated. Among chemical classes, only flavonoids (which are most frequently bitter) had a positive association with both AIA and ACA, a finding confirming that taste has predictive primacy over chemical class. Therefore, bitter taste receptor agonists and sweet taste receptor antagonists may have a beneficial effect in slowing down the progression of inflammation to cancer.
Keywords: anti-inflammatory; bitter; cancer; phytochemical; sweet; taste; taste receptors.