The glycobiology of prostate cancer: an update

Prostate cancer is a common cancer in males and there is an urgent unmet clinical need to improve early diagnosis and identify new treatments for advanced disease. Despite huge progress in understanding changes to the genome and proteome in prostate cancer, there is a relative delay in revealing the full aspects of the prostate cancer glycome and glycoproteome. Glycobiology has been fundamental in recent discoveries in the medical field, including translational cancer research. Glycans functionally contribute to the cancer hallmarks and serve as important diagnostic biomarkers and targets for therapeutic intervention. Changes to glycans are common in prostate cancer and include increased branching of complex N-glycans, changes in sialylation, increased fucosylation, altered PSA glycosylation and the expression of truncated O-glycans. This review discusses the role of glycans in fundamental mechanisms controlling prostate cancer growth, metastasis and immune evasion. Emphasis is placed on discoveries made during the last decade, including new insights provided by N-glycan imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) profiling of prostate cancer tissues, new discoveries into the role of aberrant glycosylation in prostate tumour biology, as well as recent studies investigating glycans, glycosyltransferase enzymes and glycan binding proteins as therapeutic targets.