The development of mass spectrometry for Clinical Glycomics

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We will develop the methods and tools that will profile glycans in human fluids to enable the discovery of markers for diseases. Cancer is a disease known to accompany aberrant glycosylation. Glycoproteins shed by diseased cells will be harvested for their glycan content and profiled to obtain disease markers. This approach represents a new paradigm for disease marker discovery. It will focus primarily on the glycans as disease markers while neglecting, at first, the identity of the associated proteins. This approach will be multifaceted and primarily glycocentric; it contrasts and complements the proteome-centered approaches currently under extensive investigations. In this process, we will develop a set of mass spectrometry-based tools for clinical glycomics. These tools will be used to observe changes in glycosylation of diseases in two human fluids, sera and tear. The fluids are chosen by the needs of our collaborator in diseases that include ovarian cancer and ocular rosacea but will have direct implications in breast cancer and prostate cancer for sera and other dry eye diseases for tear fluids. While disease markers will be the future outcome of these studies, they will not be the only focus of this project. Instead we will also develop the tools that will be used by our collaborators to discover markers for these diseases and lay the foundation for the use of mass spectrometry in clinics for glycomic analyses.