2ⁿᵈ Edition of the Cancer R&D World Conference 2026

Abstract

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in the world. Due to the invasiveness of colonoscopies and a general aversion to fecal-based testing, support for a new detection method is growing. Breast cancer is another of the world’s most common forms of cancer, whose primary detection method of mamography is plagued by high false positive and false negative rates. For these reasons, we focus on the development of improved detection methods for both cancers. Aberrant glycosylation occurs during the onset and throughout the progression of cancer. Herein, we use a synthetic lectin array to classify normal and cancerous colon-derived cell lines based on glycan expression. We report success in detecting colorectal cancer in cell lines by probing for glycan expression in both membrane and secreted samples. The success of these results give credence to the development of a liquid biopsy for cancer detection using the synthetic lectin array. To explore this idea, a BALB/cByJ mouse model was used to show that this same analysis can diagnose and subtype colorectal cancer in mice with 93% classification accuracy in less than 24 hours using glycoproteins extracted from less than 100 uL of whole blood. Further studies focus on using human-derived serum samples for the detection of colorectal and breast cancers. Herein, we report early success in cancer detection from human-derived serum samples, the discovery of new synthetic lectins which show selectivity towards triple-negative breast cancer associated glycans, and suggest further studies into the glycosylation of these diseases.