Protein glycosylation is important for cell signaling and the onset & progression of cancer. Traditional tumor biomarkers have their limitation of being non-specific that sometimes results in the false positive diagnosis. The current article outlines the use of glycans and their efficacy in early diagnosis of malignancies. Glycans are oligosaccharides conjugated with lipid or protein by virtue of glycosidic bonding and the procedure is known as glycosylation. It’s estimated that over 50% of all human proteins are glycosylated.
It’s now established that glycosylation levels are significantly altered in carcinogenesis. For this reason, glycans have their importance in specific detection of cancer. In most cancer cases, predominant glycosylation steps are fucosylation and sialylation. Glycans are new age cancer biomarkers that address two major pitfalls of most traditional cancer…
