The early diagnosis and treatment of cancer has been deeply concerned by researchers. New therapeutic and diagnostic materials for human diseases are in need to be developed. In comparison to the variety of larger and less controlled glycomaterials such as glyco-liposomes, glycodendrimers, glyco-nanoparticles and glycopolymers, glycoclusters were intensely investigated in recent decades.

Recently, the scientific journal Chemical Communications reported the latest scientific research about supramolecular assembly of fluorogenic glyco-dots from perylenediimide-based glycoclusters for targeted imaging of cancer cells. The research was conducted by teams of Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIMMCAS) and East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST).

The team constructed supramolecular fluorogenic glyco-dots based on carbohydrate–protein interactions (PDIs). The glyco-dots incorporating a red-emitting fluorophore showed high water solubility, structural uniformity as well as high biocompatibility in targeted fluorescence cell imaging. Experimental results showed that the structurally uniform and stable glyco-dots were amenable to targeted fluorogenic imaging of liver and triple-negative breast cancer cells.

The finding paves the way for the simple construction of water soluble glycocluster-based supramolecular biosensors for fluorogenic protein detection towards targeted cancer diagnosis.

This work was completed under the corporation between LI Jia & ZANG Yi’s (SIMMCAS) group and CHEN Guo-Rong & HE Xiao-Peng’s (ECUST) group.

The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Shanghai Rising-Star Program.

Full text：http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/cc/c7cc07666e

Fig.1: Synthesis of the hexavalent and tetravalent PDI-based glycoclusters.

Fig.2: Fluorescence imaging and quantification of different cancer cells

Contact person:
Prof. LI Jia
Email: jli@simm.ac.cn

（Credit：LIU Ying）