Professor and alumna discover new proteins

After nearly a decade of research, Swapan Ghosh, a professor of biology, and Nisreen Al-Shaibi, an ISU alumna in the immunology program, discovered two new proteins that could help with brain development and could help fight off diseases.

“Professor Ghosh and I discovered two new proteins that could be helpful in studies of brain development and detection of diseases,” Al-Shaibi said.

Al-Shaibi said the breakthrough may ultimately fight off tumor cells and infected cells by hunting down the development of myeloid dendritic cells.

Ghosh and Al-Shaibi worked on this discovery for Al-Shaibi’s dissertation to complete her Ph.D. in immunology and have worked on this project for seven years.

As a result of this research, they recently received a patent for a biomarker that could be used to create vaccines to prevent diseases.

“This achievement represents an advancement in the field that researchers and clinicians worldwide can now learn about and perhaps use or adopt in their own work,” said Arthur Halpern, chair of the Department of Biology.

Discovering two new proteins creates room for more advancement in the field of biology.

“We discovered two new proteins associated with these white cells called dendritic cells,” Ghosh said. ”These cells can respond to a stimulus like that of a vaccine.”

Al-Shaibi studied the two new proteins, looking for identifying characteristics.

“I characterized these cells and identified that they could be important as biomarkers to hunt down developmental stages of white blood cells,” Al-Shaibi said.

Halpern said this patent will be very helpful with further  research.

“The patent will provide systematic details that might be useful for diagnostic purposes, as well as for increasing our basic understanding of how immune cells work,” Halpern said.

Ghosh is an expert in lymphomas, and his lab has been studying them for over two decades. Lymphoma is a cancer of the lymphatic system.

“I study these cells in order to design effective vaccines, which would prevent infection and cancer,” Ghosh said.

“The proteins and antibodies that our bodies produce to fight dendritic cells could be useful to evaluate a vaccine or to signal whether the body is responding to some infection, cancer,” Halpern said.