The vitamin A metabolite, retinoic acid (RA), first received attention as an interventional therapy upon discovery that it could substitute for more toxic chemotherapeutic regimens to dramatically improve the prognosis of acute promyelocytic leukemia, a malignancy caused by genetic translocations with the retinoic acid receptor (RAR), RARα( de The and Chen, 2010). Exposing its critical contribution to immunological health, vitamin A supplementation was shown to dramatically curb young-childhood mortality in endemic regions of malnutrition ( Rahmathullah et al., 1990 Sommer, 2008 Sommer et al., 1986). Subsequently designated vitamin A, studies over the years have demonstrated the pleiotropic influence of this nutrient, ranging from eyesight and organogenesis to metabolism and immunological fitness ( Acin-Perez et al. Using different dietary supplements they arrived at the seminal conclusion that a single factor present in lipids was essential for growth and survival, which they coined “fat soluble factor A” ( Wolf, 1996). McCollum and Thomas Osborne independently embarked on studies to identify dietary constituents that were essential for mammalian health and survival.
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