Kathryn Rosenbrock
Research Mentor: Xing Fan
Mentor Department: Neurosurgery and Cell and Developmental Biology, Medicine
Author(s): Kathryn Rosenbrock, Amelia Gasevski, Karan Deol, Xing Fan
Session: Session 5 (2:00 PM – 2:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 121
Abstract
Glioblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults, with less than 5% of patients surviving more than 2 years and new therapeutic strategies are desperately needed. The cancer stem cell hypothesis purports that only by removing cancer stem cells within a tumor can the cancer be cured. Although CD133 and side population have been used to isolate glioblastoma stem cells, recent data indicated that cancer stem cells also exist in CD133 negative and non-side population in some types of cancer, including glioblastoma. This suggests that additional markers are needed to isolate pure cancer stem cell populations. There has also been a finding that the NOTCH signaling pathway regulates normal stem cells in the brain, and that GBMs contain stem-like cells with higher NOTCH activity. Through this study it was discovered that some cancer cells were resistant to the notch pathways. Therefore, the goal of this proposal is to identify notch resistance within stem cell populations and eventually use these resistances to identify the gene signature for these cancer stem cells in malignant brain tumors. To achieve this an alamar blue cell titer assay was performed to find the concentration of notch preceptors that kills 50% of the cancer cells and a growth curve of the data to find the optimal concentration and incubation time to find resistant cells was created.
