Promoting Bone Growth by Altering Sugar Chains may Help Treat Osteoporosis

Altering sugar groups in stem cells promote bone growth and can have important implications for future treatments of osteoporosis.

Altering the structure of sugar chains on the surface of stem cells could help promote bone growth, shows new study at the University of York.

The discovery could have important implications for future treatments of osteoporosis, a condition that affects more than 3 million in the UK and causes bone to become fragile and susceptible to fracture and breakage.

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‘Stem cells when treated with a commonly used laboratory chemical called kifunensine alters sugar chains and promotes bone growth.’

Sugar chains coat all cells in the body and function in a variety ways, such as supporting the immune system and defining blood groups, but their structure has a 'randomness' that has made them a very complex feature to understand.

A researcher in bone formation and a researcher in cell sugars combined expertise to examine whether these sugars might have a role to play in forming bone. They treated cells with a commonly used laboratory chemical that alters sugar chains, called kifunensine, to see how they would react.

Dr Daniel Ungar, from the University's Department of Biology, said: "The chemical, kifunensine, is well known to alter the structure of sugar chains. It has been examined for potential drug treatments before, but is yet to make any clinical trials. We wanted to see what it might do to bone-forming stem cells in laboratory testing.

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"The complexity of these sugars means that they have never been tested in this way before, but we found that after a couple of days, interrupting the sugars' normal function enabled them to enhance bone formation processes in stem cells."

This is the first time that these sugar chains have been connected to bone growth and could pave the way for new investigations into possible future treatments for osteoporosis, where bone strength is a particular issue. Professor Paul Genever, from the University of York's Department of Biology, said: "Currently the most commonly used drugs for treating osteoporosis aim to prevent further bone loss to halt progression of the disease, but we have no reliable candidates for actually restoring bone strength.