Glycan Biomarkers in Cancer Diagnosis

Glycosylation is a post-translational modification that is found on about 70% of all human proteins. It is sensitive to the biochemical envirnonment and has been shown to vary between contral and cancer patients. Glycans represent a new paradigm for biomarker discovery, but is faced with considerable challenges. Glycans are difficult to analyze in terms of their structure and their position in the proteins. In this presentation, the methods for glycan analysis are described in context of biomarker discovery. Glycosylation holds considerable promise potentially increasing the sensitivity and specificity