Aggressive estrogen receptor-negative breast cancers with reduced ST6GalNAc2 expression alter O-linked glycans on tumor cell surface, increasing soluble lectin galectin-3 binding and tumor cell clustering at metastatic sites.
These data demonstrate that the prometastatic role of galectin-3 is regulated by its ability to bind to the tumor cell surface and highlight the potential of monitoring ST6GalNAc2 expression to stratify patients with breast cancer for treatment with galectin-3 inhibitors.
The SIATL1 gene, encoding STM, was mapped to the long arm of human chromosome 17 at q23-qter, a region that is nonrandomly deleted in human breast cancers.