Lactose-functionalized dendrimers arbitrate the interaction of galectin-3/MUC1 mediated cancer cellular aggregation.

By using lactose-functionalized poly(amidoamine) dendrimers as a tunable multivalent platform, we studied cancer cell aggregation in three different cell lines (A549, DU-145, and HT-1080) with galectin-3. We found that small lactose-functionalized G(2)-dendrimer 1 inhibited galectin-3-induced aggregation of the cancer cells. In contrast, dendrimer 4 (a larger, generation 6 dendrimer with 100 carbohydrate end groups) caused cancer cells to aggregate through a galectin-3 pathway. This study indicates that inhibition of cellular aggregation occurred because 1 provided competitive binding sites for galectin-3 (compared to its putative cancer cell ligand, TF-antigen on MUC1). Dendrimer 4, in contrast, provided an excess of ligands for galectin-3 binding; this caused crosslinking and aggregation of cells to be increased.