Research Interests:
Protein- and lipid-bound saccharides play essential roles in many molecular processes impacting eukaryotic biology and disease. Progress in glycoscience is, however, hampered by the inaccessibility of well-defined oligosaccharides and glycoconjugates for biological and biomedical studies. My laboratory is addressing these issues by developing chemical and chemoenzymatic methods and strategies for complex oligosaccharide and glycoconjugate synthesis. The new methodologies are being applied for synthesis of biological important oligosaccharides such as N- and O-glycans, ganglio-oligosaccharides, heparan sulfates, tumor-associated antigens, and capsular polysaccharides of pathogenic bacteria. A hallmark of my program is to employ synthesized target molecules for biological and biomedical explorations and in particular, our team is making contributions to the understanding of infectious, immunological and inflammatory processes mediated by complex glycans and glycoconjugates at a molecular level. This information, in turn, is being exploited for the design of fully synthetic immuno-modulators, vaccines and anti-inflammatory and cancer drugs. A highlight of such program was the design, chemical synthesis, and immunological examination of three-component vaccine candidates that offer a prospect to be employed as a therapeutic vaccine for many types of epithelial cancer. Synthetic glycans are also being used for microarray development and screening efforts have identified lead compounds that are being developed as glycomimetics for the treatment of various diseases. The Boons group is also making substantial contributions to bioconjugation and the development of methods for visualization of glycoconjugates of living cells.