Glycan Profiling Identifies Chondroitin-4-sulfate as a Biomarker for Platinum Response and Therapeutic Target in Ovarian Cancer

For women with advanced ovarian cancer (OC), remission is typically achieved through surgery and combination chemotherapy, with duration largely dependent on tumor sensitivity to platinum-based drugs. Here, we show that tumor-associated glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) influence platinum drug efficacy in preclinical models of ovarian cancer. Due to the complexity of GAG biosynthesis and the involvement of multiple enzymes, traditional transcriptomic and proteomic approaches cannot accurately estimate their levels or correlation with patient response and survival. To address this, we quantitatively analyzed the full compositional profile of GAGs in OC patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models with known carboplatin sensitivity. Our results revealed a significant correlation between carboplatin resistance and high levels of the predominant GAG sequence, chondroitin-4-sulfate (C4S). Further investigation in cellular models demonstrated that high GAG expression reduces carboplatin uptake, DNA adduct formation, and tumor accumulation, whereas the opposite effect was observed for Triplatin, a GAG-targeting platinum agent. These trends were further validated in vivo, where treatment of OC PDX models with varying C4S levels confirmed that carboplatin efficacy decreases while Triplatin activity increases in tumors with high C4S expression. Based on these findings, we established a C4S cut-off score to predict tumor sensitivity, identifying a threshold above which tumors are likely to be carboplatin-resistant but Triplatin-sensitive. Analysis of patient tissue microarrays estimated that 40-83% of OC tumors, depending on subtype, exhibit high C4S expression. Collectively, these findings highlight the predictive power of C4S as a biomarker for platinum response and support the clinical evaluation of Triplatin as a targeted treatment for patients with carboplatin-resistant tumors expressing high levels of C4S.