Home Department: Biology
Supported by: Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Mentor: Michael F. Clarke, Professor of Cancer Biology

Kamen Simeonov will be starting his senior year at Stanford in the autumn, during which he will complete a major in biology. He is currently working in a cancer stem cell lab where he is using a qPCR based assay to measure the differences in telomere length that arise from the consecutive cellular divisions between the adult stem cells and the final terminally differentiated cells of the colon, mammary, and hematopoietic tissue systems. Kamen believes that this assay has the potential to quickly and efficiently characterize how telomere length correlates with specific populations of cells in normal, premalignant, and malignant tissue.

Poster presented at the Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Symposium on August 25, 2010:

Measuring Telomere Length at the Single Cell Level in Normal and Malignant Colon Stem Cells

Kamen Simeonov, Michael Rothenberg, Ysbrand Nusse, Piero Dalerba, Michael Clarke
[Biology, Medicine, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Institute; Stanford University]