A sweet biomarker for gastric cancer: could glycans lead to earlier diagnosis?
New research has identified the possible importance of glycans for the early diagnosis of gastric cancer.
Researchers from the University of California, Davis (CA, USA) and across the globe (including the Mexican Social Security Institute [Mexico City, Mexico] and Chungnam National University [Daejeon, South Korea]) studied the potential of glycans for gastric cancer diagnosis. The team suggests that their discovery may help reduce the currently poor 5-year survival rate of gastric cancer patients (26.9% in the US) by identifying the cancer before it becomes too dangerous.
The present study, published in Cancer Prevention Research, used 72 patient samples to study whether serum glycans could be used to differentiate between gastric cancer, duodenal ulcer and gastritis patients. MS and LC were utilized to determine glycan levels in all of the samples.
Glycans are attached to proteins via glycosylation, which allows the glycoproteins to complete their functions. In cancer the enzymes involved in glycosylation can be modified, which leads to changes in which glycans attach to which proteins and therefore glycoprotein functions can be altered.
Lead author on the study, Jay Solnick (University of California, Davis), commented, “We showed statistically significant differences between the serum glycan profiles of patients with gastric cancer and those with gastritis. This is the first time anyone has looked at whether serum glycans could be used to detect gastric cancer.”
The findings of the study reported 19 significant alterations to the glycans, three of which identified gastric cancer patients from gastritis patients. The Helicobacter pylori infection rarely leads to both duodenal ulcers and gastric cancer in the same patient, therefore the authors had hoped to report different alterations in glycans between these two conditions, which may contribute to preventing cancer development. However, glycans from both of these conditions presented no significant differences.
The findings of this study demonstrate differential glycan expression in gastritis and gastric cancer. In future, further research may determine whether the altered glycosylation could be useful in predicting cancer and thereby reducing mortality rates through earlier diagnosis.
Carlito Lebrilla (University of California, Davis) stated, “In gastric and other cancers, there are high false positive rates and unnecessary biopsies. We want to minimize these unneeded procedures. We found changes in glycosylation that were consistent with other cancers we have observed. While this study focused specifically on gastric cancer, glycan concentrations could potentially be used to predict other cancers, such as ovarian and lung.”
Source: Detecting gastric cancer early – it’s in the sugars.
