COMPLEXITY OF SUGARS
Overcoming obstacles to commercial opportunity
The key challenge to realizing the potential of complex sugars has been unlocking their structural complexity. Compared to other biomolecules such as DNA or proteins, complex sugars are much more complex and contain much more information. This has inhibited the widespread analysis and application of complex sugars to drug development. Among the key challenges of sugars are:
- Greater structural complexity — complex sugars have a great number of distinct building blocks and can exist in linear or branched forms
- Inability to amplify — sugars cannot be duplicated into large quantities for analysis
- Inherent heterogeneity — sugars are typically found as complex mixtures of similar, but distinct, sequences
These effects make thorough analysis of complex sugars a formidable challenge. Consider the challenge of trying to sequence the chemical composition of a mixture of hundreds of different linear sugar chains when one five-unit-long chain alone has over 255 million potential combinations.
As a consequence, the development of drugs containing sugars to date has been through more of a trial and error approach. We plan to change this. What we seek to develop are structurally informed engineering and development processes. We believe understanding the structure, specific function and manner in which complex sugars affect specific drugs, as well as critical biological processes and pathways, will provide significant commercial opportunities for drug development.