Scientists have found a way to create artificial sugars that could lead to better ways to diagnose and treat diseases more accurately than ever before. Image Credit: The University of Manchester Sugars play a crucial role in human health and disease, far beyond being just an energy source. Complex sugars called glycans coat all our cells and are essential for healthy function.
However, these sugars are often hijacked by pathogens such as influenza, Covid-19, and cholera to infect us. One big problem in treating and diagnosing diseases and infections is that the same glycan can bind to many different proteins, making it hard to understand exactly what’s happening in the body and has made it difficult to develop precise medical tests and treatments. In a breakthrough, published in the journal Nature Communications, a collaboration of academic and industry experts in Europe, including from The University of Manchester and the University of Leeds, have found a way to create unnatural sugars that could block the pathogens.
The finding offers a promising avenue to new drugs and could also open doors in diagnostics by ‘capturing’ the pathogens or their toxins. Professor Matthew Gibson, a researcher from Manchester Institute of Biotechnology at The University of Manchester, said “During the Covid-19 pandemic, our team introduced the first lateral flow tests which used sugars instead of antibodies as the ‘recognition unit’. But the limit is always how specific and selectiv.