Jana Daoud / Biology / Faculty Mentor: Piya Ghose
Cancer treatment is a prominent concern in the medical and research fields. Constituently, identifying genes present in malignant tissue is a common approach to thoroughly understanding how disease arises in healthy tissue and how to treat it. Of these genes is Prominin-1 (CD 133), a pentaspan transmembrane glycoprotein present in neuronal cells. Studies have shown that malignant forms of these cells tend to exhibit an overexpression of CD 133, particularly in neuronal diseases. However, there has yet to be a definitive protocol in the clinical setting to utilize this biomarker as a diagnostic tool. In our literature-based study, we (1) propose the application of CD 133 as a biomarker for neurodevelopmental disease and (2) examine why CD 133 is upregulated under pathological states. We examine similarities between the hallmarks of neurodevelopment and pathological conditions linked to CD 133 overexpression to evaluate the utility of CD 133 as a marker for specific neurodevelopmental states. We propose studying homologs of CD 133, which is conserved among genetically tractable invertebrate organisms such as fruit flies and nematodes as well, to better understand the reason, role, and molecular mechanism of its overexpression with the long-term goal of identifying additional biomarkers and possibly therapeutic targets.
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