# Status Quo of Glycoslation in Cancer: What Is, What Is Not and What Is to Be
## 3 Futuristic Challenges for Glycoslation in Cancers and Conclusions  
As evidenced in the previous section, glycosylation has come a long way in cancer diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. However, there are evident challenges facing the future of glycosylation in cancer. Single biomarkers with moderate sensitivity and specificity for the most common cancers are yet to be identified and some biomarkers are ineffective for the early detection of cancer. Well-designed clinical validation is a prerequisite before clinical application. Bioinformatic approaches and advanced Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms need to be applied to gain significant progress. Although there are a large number of bioinformatics resources for glycosylation research, almost nothing has been utilized towards glycosylation in cancer. The glycopolarkers need more clinical validation before they capture the attention of major industry players. The process of validation has been very slow due to lack of suitable high-throughput tools, that are still under development. In the past few years there has been a growing concern that no single biomarker can be reliably used for cancer diagnosis. Further improvements with specific glycan binding receptors and multiplexed assays with computer-assisted pattern analysis is needed in glycobiosenoser research for breakthroughs in cancer biomarker discovery [163]. Such integrated and combined approaches are needed in order  
Figure 2: Overview of aberrant glycosylation and its correlation with other hallmarks of cancer, altered expression of sialic acid, sialyltransferase, sialidase, sialoproteins, fucose, trocoprotein, fucosidase, fucosyltransferase, mannose and galactose inter-correlated with cancer hallmarks like invasion, metastasis, proliferation, angiogenesis, evasion of growth suppressors, apoptosis, and replicative immortality. to see progress in this area of research. A coalescence of all three \"omics\" technologies can result in the integration of protein, gene, and glycan biomarkers into multiplexed platforms, yielding viable cancer diagnostic platforms. In terms of analytical upgrading, the target of pertinent cancer-specific glycosylation as well as lectin-based capture is crucial for detection. It is strangely interesting to add here that although nanoplatforms have been able to push the detection limits and overcome sensitivity limitations, nothing much has been done to involve the nano aspects of this area. Most of the analytical work on glycosylation and cancer reported thus far are all surrounding traditional MS and a handful of MS variants only, and none include the upgraded nano-MS variants. This appears to be a sort of saturation in the research area and a lack of enthusiasm. This is a cross-disciplinary field involving analytical chemists and biologist as well as medical expertise, and is speculated to be the core reason for these broken links. Cutting-edge achievements of techniques including MS, CE, UPLC, which focus on glycomics as well as lectin-based glyco-capture, microarray and microfluidics which focus on aberrantly glycosylated glycoproteins, have greatly accelerated the discovery and application potentialities of glycomics and glycoprotein markers in various cancers. However, it is too early now to expect that these analytical methods can deliver the anticipated glyco-biomarker revolution. Nano-integrated analytical instrumentation being the current state-of-the-art technology, will no doubt push the analytical limits towards some positive progress. This review brings to notice that none of the nano-analytical platforms have been applied to glycosylation research in the area of cancer. As in all areas of science, the rise of nano has created plenty of room for this, and there is no doubt there is much scope for enhancing glycobiological research through successful application. Maybe, nano is that what is needed to take glycosylation from bechside to bedside. The success of future glycoldiagnostics depends on the availability of new and improved nano-based glycan-binding probes.