Amelia Gasevski
Research Mentor: Xing Fan
Mentor Department: Neurosurgery and Cell and Developmental Biology, Medicine
Author(s): Amelia Gasevski, Kathryn Rosenbrock, Karan Deol, Xing Fan
Session: Session 2 (10:00 AM – 10:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 75
Abstract
Glioblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults, with less than 5% of patients surviving more than 2 years, meaning that new therapeutic strategies are desperately needed. The cancer stem cell hypothesis claims that a cancer can be cured by simply removing cancer stem cells within a tumor. Although CD133 and side population have been used to isolate Glioblastoma stem cells, recent data indicates that cancer stem cells also exist in CD133-negative cells and non-side population in some types of cancer, including glioblastoma, suggesting that additional markers are needed to isolate a pure cancer stem cell population. There have also been findings that suggest that the NOTCH signaling pathway regulates normal stem cells in the brain, and that Glioblastoma Multiformes (GBMs) contain stem-like cells with higher NOTCH activity. This study found that some cancer cells were resistant to the NOTCH pathway. Therefore, the goal of this research 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. In order to achieve this, we will perform an Alamar Blue Cell Titer Assay in order to find the concentration of notch preceptors that kills 50% of glioblastoma cells, as well as create a growth curve of our data to discover the optimal concentration and incubation time of the resistant cells we are trying to detect.
