Detection of Abnormal Sugar-Protein Complexes in Blood

Scientists have developed a simple method for detecting the abnormal presence of complexes of sugars and proteins in the blood of cancer patients, thus providing a new tool for cancer diagnosis.

Glycosylation of proteins plays a role in cell adhesion and in cell-cell and receptor-ligand interactions. Abnormal glycosylation is related to disease states such as cancer, and therefore, the gluteoproteome is a target for biomarker discovery.

Danish scientists utilized the high selective affinity of sialic acids for titanium dioxide to estimate the number of protein-containing sialic acid structures in blood plasma. They used titanium dioxide chromatography together with mass spectrometry to isolate the parts of the cell surface proteins that are attached to sialic acid, which is the part of some of the sugars that are attached to these proteins. They compared the number of protein-sugar structures that contain sialic acid in the blood plasma of a control individual and a patient with advanced bladder cancer. They found that the cancer patient's blood contained a significantly higher number of the sialic acid containing structures than the control individual.

Prof. Martin R. Larsen, from the department of biochemistry and molecular biology, University of Southern Denmark (Odense, Denmark), and colleagues who performed the study, concluded that the method is a promising way to diagnose cancer and other diseases with excess sialic acid-containing protein-sugar structures. The study was reported in the October 6, 2007, issue of the journal Molecular and Cellular Proteomics.


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University of Southern Denmark