GlyCANswer · Decoding the Cancer Glycoproteome Driven Immune Response

Decoding the Cancer Glycoproteome Driven Immune Response

Cancer continues to be a big challenge in modern medicine and the second leading cause of deaths worldwide. However, in recent years, the treatment of unresectable cancer has undergone a paradigm shift with the advent of immunotherapy. Unfortunately, despite the great progress in the field, the majority of breast cancer patients still do not respond to any of the available immunotherapeutics and no reliable biomarker exists to predict those patients that would benefit from it. This shortcoming is due to an incomplete understanding of how cancer cells interact with the immune system. One of the cancer cell mechanisms, whose immunomodulatory function is poorly understood, is glycosylation. Glycosylation is the modification of cell products with complex carbohydrates. These carbohydrates fulfill important functions in the communication and regulation of tissue organization and in regulating the immune system. However, it is still technically difficult to assess the glycosylation of cancer cells. Therefore, this project aimed to develop a new method to analyze the cancer cell glycosylation and thus to improve our understanding how cancer cell glycosylation regulates the immune system. This would facilitate the development of new strategies for immunotherapy and identify improved predictive biomarkers for treatment response. In this project various complementary methods for the analysis of the glycosylation of cancer cells were applied to provide a comprehensive characterization of the cancer cells. In addition, a completely new method to analyze glycoproteins produced by cancer cells was established yielding new insights into the cancer biology.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union