Grant: Project Grant

All of the cells in our body are coated with different types of sugar molecules. Cells in our immune system have ways of "tasting" these sugars. Some types of sugars taste good to our immune system, signaling that our cells are healthy and that everything is normal. Other sugars (like those attached to invading bacteria, viruses or cancer cells) taste bad to our immune cells, triggering them to activate and try to protect us from disease. Sometimes our cells can become altered in ways that lead them to produce different or abnormal types of sugar molecules on their surface. When this happens, it can lead our immune cells to overlook unhealthy cells (in the case of cancer). Understanding the details of how this happens can help us develop new drugs to treat such diseases. We face the problem, however, that these cellular sugar molecules are not like the sugar that we eat. Cellular sugars are notoriously chemically complex, making it difficult to predict exactly how specific types of sugar molecules will affect our immune system. This proposal attempts to solve this problem by using advanced genetic techniques to better understand the ways in which immune cells interact with cell-surface sugars. The goal of the project is to identify specific proteins that bind to cancer-associated sugars whose activity can then be blocked for therapeutic purposes.