Glycobiology World Congress

Biography

Biography: Yves St-Pierre

Abstract

Carbohydrates are traditionally considered to be an important source of energy for living organisms. In the field of biology, they are defined as organic compounds composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that are organized into ring structures. The analysis of these structures and their functions has led to a new field of biology called “glycobiology.” In the biomedical sciences, glycobiology is rapidly emerging as an integral part of complex biological processes. Evidence suggesting that the interactions between lectins and their ligands play a major role in the different steps of cancer progression has accumulated at a rapid pace and has gained the attention of several oncologists. This is particularly true for galectin family members because changes in their expression levels correlate with alterations in cancer cell growth, apoptosis, and, due to their cytokine-like properties, they are major activators or inhibitors of immune responses. In mammals, 19 galectins have been identified, of which 13 are expressed in human tissues. While they perform homeostatic functions inside normal cells, under pathological or stress conditions, cytosolic galectins are released either passively from dead cells or actively via non-classical secretion pathways. Once in the extracellular milieu, they bind all glycosylated growth receptors on the surface of normal and cancer cells to set their signaling threshold. Such properties enable galectins to kill of infiltrating immune cells while promoting growth of tumor cells. We hypothesize that galectins play an important role in the tumor microenvironment which undergo profound alterations during cancer. Such alterations remains one of the great obstacle in the successful treatment of cancer is therapeutic resistance and cancer recurrence. This is especially true for cancer with poor outcome, such as triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) or ovarian cancer, for which no therapeutic targets exist. Here, we will discuss the relevance of the galectinome in TNBCs and ovarian cancer.