Medical, Food, and Agricultural Cooperation and Antiaging Medicine

From the 1990s to the 2000s, precision medicine and precision agriculture emerged and spread globally almost simultaneously. This expanded the scope of medical and agricultural cooperation, and increased the momentum for the development of food ingredients based on medical data. Both were triggered by the introduction of cutting-edge technologies in information science and bioscience, and the sharing of specialized knowledge became possible. Precision medicine is a medical management concept that focuses on the individual variability of human pathological conditions, analyzing down to the cellular and genetic level, and providing appropriate treatment prescriptions for each individual [1]. In 2015, President Obama of the United States announced the “Precision Medicine Initiative,” which attracted attention. Especially in the field of preventive medicine, when creating prescriptions for lifestyle-related diseases, it is necessary to propose improvements in dietary habits that are tailored to the individual’s actual situation, and food ingredients with functions that respond to these requests are needed. Precision agriculture is a farm management concept that aims to propose prescriptions that achieve both productivity improvement and environmental conservation by tracking, recording, analyzing, and visualizing the variability of farms down to the individual crop level [2, 3]. In recent years, precision agriculture is also referred to as smart agriculture. For example, a group at Tsukuba University has developed a system that can stably produce crop varieties that contain a large amount of the functional substance gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) through genome editing and plant factories, and it has become possible to reorganize and adjust production processes using advanced technologies in response to strict environmental constraints and market needs. The industrial ethics of good medical practice (GMP) and good agricultural practice (GAP) are also being encouraged, and a situation has arisen where the concept of medicine and food being of the same origin, which has been said from the past, can be implemented backed by the latest scientific achievements and ethics.