Image created by Christina Loukou
A research team from the NIBRT Dublin-Oxford Glycobiology Laboratory at UCD has come up with a system that may pinpoint potential "biomarkers" of early forms of cancer. The researchers have achieved this by looking at the structures of specific sugar molecules, which are attached either to proteins made by cancerous cells or to proteins involved in the host response. A presentation on the study was made at the Society for Experimental Biology's Annual Meeting in Marseille in July.
Professor Pauline Rudd, who led the project, believes that this work may allow scientists to devise new ways to monitor disease progression and response to therapy more accurately than is currently possible. Prof Rudd points out that cancer cells not only have different sets of proteins from normal human cells, but that their proteins have changes in the types and numbers of sugar molecules that are attached to them.
According to Prof Rudd, being able to detect such changes holds the key to developing a new approach for diagnosing cancer. "We have found that there are alterations in sugars attached to proteins in blood serum from all cancers we have looked at, and some of these appear to be early markers of the disease processes. What’s more, we have been able to isolate several sugar-linked variants of particular proteins which are associated with different types of cancer, including prostate, pancreatic, ovarian and breast cancers," she says.
"In the long term, we envisage that by finding more specific sugar variants, we will be able to use combinations of these as biomarkers to allow very accurate early diagnosis of particular cancers," she adds. Prof Rudd believes that such techniques may act alongside, or even replace, physical methods like scanning, which are less dependable for early diagnosis.
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