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Copyright ©The Author(s) 2018. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jun 28, 2018; 24(24): 2537-2554
Published online Jun 28, 2018. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v24.i24.2537
Glycoprotein biomarkers for the detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma
Esther Llop, Pedro E Guerrero, Adrià Duran, Sílvia Barrabés, Anna Massaguer, María José Ferri, Maite Albiol-Quer, Rafael de Llorens, Rosa Peracaula
Esther Llop, Pedro E Guerrero, Adrià Duran, Sílvia Barrabés, Anna Massaguer, María José Ferri, Rafael de Llorens, Rosa Peracaula, Department of Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Unit, University of Girona, Girona 17003, Spain
Esther Llop, Pedro E Guerrero, Adrià Duran, Sílvia Barrabés, Anna Massaguer, María José Ferri, Rafael de Llorens, Rosa Peracaula, Biomedical Research Institute of Girona (IdIBGi). Parc Hospitalari Martí i Julià-Edifici M2, Salt 17190, Spain
María José Ferri, Clinic Laboratory, University Hospital Dr Josep Trueta, Girona 17007, Spain
Maite Albiol-Quer, Department of Surgery, Hepato-biliary and Pancreatic Surgery Unit, University Hospital Dr Josep Trueta, Girona 17007, Spain
Author contributions: Llop E, de Llorens R and Peracaula R contributed to this paper with conception and design of the study, literature review and analysis, drafting and critical revision and editing; Guerrero PE, Duran A, Barrabés S, Massaguer A, Ferri MJ and Albiol-Quer M contributed to literature review and analysis, drafting and critical revision; all authors approved the final version of the manuscript.
Supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity, No. BIO 2015-66356-R and the Generalitat de Catalunya Grant, No. 2017SGR673.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Rosa Peracaula, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Unit, University of Girona, C/Maria Aurèlia Capmany 40, Girona 17003, Spain. rosa.peracaula@udg.edu
Telephone: +34-972-418370 Fax: +34-972-418150
Received: March 23, 2018
Peer-review started: March 25, 2018
First decision: April 27, 2018
Revised: May 4, 2018
Accepted: June 9, 2018
Article in press: June 9, 2018
Published online: June 28, 2018
Processing time: 94 Days and 15.5 Hours
Abstract

Pancreatic cancer (PaC) shows a clear tendency to increase in the next years and therefore represents an important health and social challenge. Currently, there is an important need to find biomarkers for PaC early detection because the existing ones are not useful for that purpose. Recent studies have indicated that there is a large window of time for PaC early detection, which opens the possibility to find early biomarkers that could greatly improve the dismal prognosis of this tumor. The present manuscript reviews the state of the art of the existing PaC biomarkers. It focuses on the anomalous glycosylation process and its role in PaC. Glycan structures of glycoconjugates such as glycoproteins are modified in tumors and these modifications can be detected in biological fluids of the cancer patients. Several studies have found serum glycoproteins with altered glycan chains in PaC patients, but they have not shown enough specificity for PaC. To find more specific cancer glycoproteins we propose to analyze the glycan moieties of a battery of glycoproteins that have been reported to increase in PaC tissues and that can also be found in serum. The combination of these new candidate glycoproteins with their aberrant glycosylation together with the existing biomarkers could result in a panel, which would expect to give better results as a new tool for early diagnosis of PaC and to monitor the disease.

Keywords: Pancreatic cancer; Aberrant glycosylation; Glycoproteins; Biomarkers; Diagnosis

Core tip: There is an urgent need to find new biomarkers for pancreatic cancer (PaC) diagnosis. The review focuses on the field of glycoproteomics and describes serum glycoproteins that have been identified up to date as potential biomarkers and their limitations basically due to the fact that they are neither pancreatic specific nor cancer specific. The review proposes new glycoprotein candidates that have been described to be overexpressed in PaC tissues and that are secreted into serum. The combination of the candidate protein levels and their glycan moieties, which could be altered in cancer, could improve their potential as PaC biomarkers.