Changes in serum protein glycosylation play an important role in inflammatory arthritis. Altered galactosylation of immunoglobulin G (IgG) in rheumatoid arthritis attracts special attention due to the devastating nature of the disease. Studying glycosylation changes of serum proteins has been recognized as a potential strategy to provide added value regarding diagnostics, aetiopathology and therapy of inflammatory arthritic diseases. Key questions, which are approached in these fields of research, are whether or not glycosylation can be used as a complementary pre-clinical and clinical marker for disease differentiation, diagnosis, the prediction of disease course and severity as well as for the evaluation of disease therapies. These studies mainly focus on TNF antagonists, which present a new and promising way of treating inflammatory arthritis. The recent availability of new high-throughput glycoanalytical tools enables a more profound and efficient investigation in large patient cohorts and helps to gain new insights in the complex mechanism of the underlying disease pathways.

Background: S25-26 displays remarkable specificity and avidity toward the unusual inner core LPS from Chlamydia. Results: Liganded and unliganded structures reveal bound antigen and significant ordered N-glycosylation on the variable heavy chain. Conclusion: Groove-type paratope recognizes the antigen in a manner distinct from all other Chlamydia-specific antibodies. Significance: Structural analysis of germ-line-coded antibodies provides insight to anaphylaxis induced by ␣-galactose (␣Gal) epitopes on therapeutic antibodies.

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On a fully automated liquid handling station, the N-glycomes of antibodies IgG, IgM, and IgA and acute phase proteins transferrin, haptoglobin and alpha-1-antitrypsin from human serum have been purified and structurally characterized using UPLC, exoglycosidase digestions and LC-MS. The glycoprofiles of the resultant AQC labelled N-glycans from each glycoprotein can be used to quantitatively compare the structural differences between healthy, borderline and metastatic ovarian cancer. Statistical tools and discrimination models are employed to generate a diagnostic tool to discriminate between different stages of ovarian cancer. Future applications of the technology termed "GlycoSeqCap" include an extension to other inflammatory diseases.

A robotic 384 well based platform was developed to release and label the human serum N-glycome. Improved separation of the glycan pool, based on hydrophilic interaction UPLC chromatography combined with mass spectrometry (Waters Corporation) and computer assisted data interpretation (NIBRT Glycobase) enabled us to build a database after assigning the detailed structures of more than 170 N-glycans. The aim of the project was to use these technologies and databases to link glycosylation changes in individual patients’ serum with features of cancer and with changes in a range of other –omics data acquired from the same patients. Alterations in glycosylation in various breast cancers were mapped to changes in the serum glycomes and aligned with genetic, transcriptomic and proteomic data. Pathway analysis showed strong associations between these glycan changes and the –omics data. This revealed that many of the glycan changes are directly associated with pathways involved in cancer metastasis. Our next aim was to demonstrate the feasibility of collecting personalised data from individual patients from each of the –omics analyses to build up a dataset of the changing glycosylation over time. This opens up the possibility of linking these data to explore pathways of disease and, in particular, nodal points where the patient can no longer compensate for the effects of an altered pathway that is leading to disease. To this end, single glycoproteins from 8 controls and 26 ovarian cancer patients were sequentially purified from 5ul of serum on affinity plates and the released glycans were analysed. Rather than the conventional way of looking at markers which compare a patients’ data with averages, the control can now be the blood of the patient themselves taken at an earlier time point. The automation, sensitivity, quantitation and resolution of the new technology platforms coupled with dedicated software open up new possibilities for precision medicine and early intervention based on the biochemical profile of the patient. References: Association of N-glycosylation with breast carcinoma and systemic features using high-resolution quantitative UPLC. Saldova R, Asadi Shehni A, Haakensen VD, Steinfeld I, Hilliard M, Kifer I, Helland A, Yakhini Z, Børresen-Dale AL, Rudd PM. J Proteome Res. 2014 May 2;13(5):2314-27. Serum N-glycan analysis in breast cancer patients–Relation to tumour biology and clinical outcome. Haakensen VD, Steinfeld I, Saldova R, Shehni AA, Kifer I, Naume B, Rudd PM, Børresen-Dale AL,Yakhini Z. Mol Oncol. 2016 Jan;10(1):59-72.   Citation Format: Pauline M. Rudd, Mark Hilliard, Mohankumar Muniyappa, Roisin O'Flaherty, Radka Saldova. New technologies to probe the systems glycobiology of cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 5544. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-5544