Feb 28
Chemistry Department Seminar: Sharon Pitteri '01 (Stanford)
Associate Professor of Radiology
"Exploiting Aberrant Glycosylation in Cancer for Diagnostics"
Cancer is a complex disease to study because it originates among a person’s normal cells. Over the past several decades, it has become well-appreciated that cancer cells use sugars for a variety of key processes, including for example, helping them hide from the immune system and spreading throughout the local tissue microenvironment. While the aberrant sugars present on proteins (glycosylation) hold key information about disease states, the modification is complicated and challenging to study. In recent years, mass spectrometry has emerged as a powerful tool to study protein glycosylation and provide unprecedented amounts of information about the composition of glycans in cancer, and which proteins are modified by these sugars. My lab seeks to exploit the biological feature of aberrant glycosylation in cancer as a readout to improve clinical diagnostics. We harness the power of analytical chemistry to develop and apply mass spectrometry-based workflows to study proteins in patient samples (e.g. tissue, urine, other biofluids) to understand what glycoprotein signatures are potential biomarkers. We also perform biological pathway analyses using the large datasets we generate to understand underlying cancer biology. Some recent examples in various cancers will be presented.
*This seminar counts towards the chemistry major seminar attendance requirement.
from Chemistry