Cancer Prevention & Control Program
Colloquium Series

“The Not So Sweet Taste of Cancer:
Diagnosis, Staging and Prognosis
of Cancer by Monitoring Associated
Changes in Glycosylation”

Friday
October 21

10 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Discovery 1 | Rm. 140
915 Greene Street

Dr. John Lavigne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South
Carolina. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin he continued work he started as a graduate
student at a start-up company. Labnetics was a point-of-care diagnostics company that is now part of Siemens
Healthcare. Dr. Lavigne began his career as a tenure track faculty member at UofSC in 2002. His area of expertise is
bio-organic chemistry with his research broadly centering on molecular recognition (studying how molecules interact).
Most recently, his laboratory has been interested in studying changes in the sugars displayed and secreted by cancer cells
(i.e., aberrant glycosylation) towards developing novel cancer diagnostics. To do this, an array of cross-reactive sensors is
used, mimicking the mammalian sense of taste, to create a fingerprint pattern of the sugars present, thereby indicating
the presence/absence of the disease as well as providing information about the disease stage and aggressiveness.