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Introduction: Breast cancer (BCa) is the most common cancer type diagnosed in women and 5th most common cause of deaths among all cancer deaths despite the fact that screening program is at place.
This is why novel diagnostics approaches are needed in order to decrease number of BCa cases and disease mortality.
Areas covered: In this review paper, we aim to cover some basic aspects regarding cellular metabolism and signalling in BCa behind altered glycosylation. We also discuss novel exciting discoveries regarding glycan-based analysis, which can provide useful information for better understanding of the disease. The final part deals with clinical usefulness of glycan-based biomarkers and the clinical performance of
such biomarkers is compared to already approved BCa biomarkers and diagnostic tools based on imaging.
Expert opinion: Recent discoveries suggest that glycan-based biomarkers offer high accuracy for possible BCa diagnostics in blood, but also for better monitoring and management of BCa patients.
The review article was written using Web of Science search engine to include articles published between 2019 and 2021.
