Glycome Atlas
Glycome pillar
Engineered glycan systems used in medicines, vaccines, antibodies, delivery platforms, and biomaterials.
Carbohydrate-based drugs are medicines that either are sugars themselves or work by acting on sugar-processing enzymes. Familiar examples include the blood thinner heparin and antiviral drugs that block a viral sugar-cutting enzyme.
Read reviewed entryGlycan therapeutics are medicines that are either made from sugar chains or designed to act on the sugar coatings that decorate our cells and proteins. Sugars are hard to work with as drugs because they are complex and easily broken down in the body, but they are also central to how cells recognize each other, so a growing set of vaccines, biologic drugs, and small molecules is built around them.
Read reviewed entryGlycoconjugate vaccines are vaccines that attach a sugar coating from the surface of a dangerous bacterium to a carrier protein. On its own the sugar trains the immune system only weakly, especially in infants, but linking it to a protein turns it into a target the immune system remembers well. Vaccines against Haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcus, and meningococcus are built this way.
Read reviewed entryGlycoengineering is the deliberate reshaping of the sugars on cells or protein drugs. Instead of accepting whatever sugars a cell happens to add, scientists redesign the pathway to get a specific, consistent sugar pattern.
Read reviewed entryGlyconanomaterials are tiny engineered particles coated with sugars. The sugar coating lets them target specific cells or receptors, much as natural glycans direct recognition in the body.
Read reviewed entryTherapeutic antibodies carry a small sugar group on a fixed spot of their tail region. This sugar is not decoration; it controls how well the antibody recruits immune cells to destroy a target such as a tumor cell.
Read reviewed entry