Prof. Mariastefania Antica a renowned scientist from Croatian Ruđer Bošković Institute and Ambassador of the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR). She was the holder of Federal Award for Young Scientists for Outstanding Scientific Achievements in the year 1987 along with many other prestigious awards. M. Antica has a long-standing interest in stem cells and leukemia research. She was involved in the basic and clinical studies on stem cells for lymphocytes which resulted in a finding of a new population of stem cells in the fetal thymus. Also, she proved T lymphocyte development at extrathymic sites in vivo.
She has done outstanding researches on leukemia. One of her recent work is on leukemia diagnosis with which she gave additional information on clinical leukemia diagnostics as well as for in vitro studies of primary cells.
Every day billions of blood cells are generated in our bone marrow. Among these blood cells, red blood cells are formed mostly. But with people who are affected with Leukaemia, white blood cells are formed more than that of red blood cells. Usually, white blood cells are responsible for fighting infections. But for people who are infected with leukemia, these white blood cells don’t fight any infections, instead, they start affecting our internal organs. Due to this, a person who is affected with leukemia will have more white blood cells than that of red blood cells.
No one knows exactly what causes leukemia cancer, because many types of leukemia show no immediate symptoms. Diagnosing leukemia can be done either by a physical examination or by a blood test. The Notch signaling pathway is commonly present in most of the multicellular organisms and is mainly responsible for cell to cell communication.
Notch family genes are responsible for the development of routes between cells and help in the cell to cell communication in our bodies and in many mammals. It is also responsible for signaling pathways in our tissues and it varies very less when compared with other species from insects to mammals. But the Notch signaling pathway varies from each cell type, even if the cells are closely related such as blood cells developing from the same hematopoietic stem cell.
Through cell-cell communication, the Notch signaling pathway also has a role in the T-cell lineage. Notch signaling pathway combined with other signaling molecules are responsible for cell development. In leukemia development, a casual Notch dysfunction occurs, as a result, cell-cell communication will be affected. Dr. Mariastefania Antica’s have introduced a method for multiple direct analysis of the Notch pathway and other signaling partners in a population of only 500 or fewer cells. With this research, they have gained insight into gene expression at the level of the malignant clone population.
Gene expression is a method by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product. These products are often proteins, from protein-coding genes through the mRNA.
As a result from multiple gene expression analysis of a small population of cells, they have gained insight on efficient cell classification which gave much information on malignant changes in these cells. This has helped in getting additional information for clinical leukemia diagnostics as well as for in vitro studies of primary cells.
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