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17-Year-Old Wins $100K For Creating Cancer Killing Nanoparticle
An anonymous reader writes "17-year-old Angeloa Zhang was recently awarded the $100,000 Grand Prize in the Individual category of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Her project was entitled 'Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells.' The creation is the so-called 'Swiss army knife of cancer treatment,' which allows a nanoparticle to be delivered to a tumor where it proceeds to kills cancer stem cells."
Cure cancer, only make 100k
It seems all prizes and research goes to Cancer and AIDS since they get the most newstime and general attention? But these two diseases seem to be extremely difficult to cure fully all the same when you consider the billions of dollars invested the last few decades.
Would it be that hard to cure ulcerative colitis or crohns with serious money invested like what we see with cancer/aids? Or it's equally difficult? Just asking from a purely scientific standpoint to discover a new drug that works, not about the process of bringing a "cure" to market with trials and approvals.
Having said that this girl sounds rather brilliant, so congrats to her!
I believe she only designed the nanoparticle. Actually creating it comes next semester.
TFA is sparse on tech details. So how exactly nano-particles know if a cell is cancerous or not?
The big pharma company(ies) will make billions from her discovery wile giving her a mere $100k! If I were her, I would have demanded indefinite royalties or 100 million dollars.
I just couldn't find information from the article or the links in the article. I was curious if this was just theory and design from a thesis or if she actually did any actual experiments. Did she design the entire nanopartical treatment or just the part about adding gold/iron based tracing compound. Did she actually verify that she could monitor a treatment in real-time with these metal additives by MRI or is this all on paper. Real time imaging of cancer treatment does sound like a good idea for measure effectiveness I just want to know how much of this work was hers the wording suggests she developed the entire nanoparticle treatment process in addition to enhancing it with a mineral they could image. I'm impressed if so and wonder just what stage her research is at.
I am wondering whether it was her specifically who did it. I have been lead to believe that high-school students work under PHD researchers. Specifically, she was working under a Stanford PHD researcher with 10 - 20 years experience researching cancer. So, I take this with a grain of salt.
Eat sleep die
Sure when they can patent your "cure" and turn you into a monopoly while undergoing lots of life long treatments.
Few $100K to get a basic work up, then their factory in China produces your nanomeds.
If they find you went shopping in Asia first and still have traces of infringing medical treatments, its lawyer time.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Now, I do not really like to be a cynic, but I just cannot imagine that big pharma will put up the money to actually cure something. There just is not the same profit margin as there is for treatments.
Perhaps, you say, a small company could put this on the market. I say, no chance. Not for lack of want, but for lack of money.
The way that the FDA is setup, it costs hundreds of millions to bring a new medication onto the market. No small company could foot the bill.
Perhaps someone else knows of a way for a small firm to do it, but I cannot think of it. Still, I hope I am wrong.
she didn't create anything, nanoparticles have been used before to kill cancer http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2008/04/kanzius_therapy
This guy did this already in a way I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kanzius But she had the brains to deliver it via the drug (not sure if his particles would be dilviered via the drug but dont see why not). Also he wanted to kill the cancer with radio waves heating the particles, her particels on the worthless biography says nothing about how the particles perform the function (at least that I saw)
until this causes the zombie outbreak.
We've cured/prevented/etc the simple stuff. No surprise as medical science advances, just like any science, the simpler problems are solved first. Things like sterilization before surgery was a major, and fairly simple, advance that prevented a lot of shit.
Well we are now getting to the more tough stuff. Things were the body attacks itself, diseases that use our immune system against us and so on. Much harder to find a way to deal with. That isn't to say we won't, but it shouldn't be surprising that it takes a lot of time and thus costs a lot of money.
The autoimmune stuff, also very hard. Again it is the body causing itself trouble. It isn't a foreign agent messing with the body, the body itself is the problem. Tough problem to deal with.
You can currently receive an Ovarian cancer vaccine treatment in Dubai that is only in a very small first trial in the States. Sure it costs over a hundred grand and insurance won't cover it but it's an interesting way to attract more wealth to the country. It won't surprise me to see more of this in the future.
No, that was actually Australia's taxpayer funded CSIRO. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples where you would be correct but you just happen to be cmpletely wrong with this one.
To make it an even worse example, the HPV vaccine is being held up by some as an example of the price gouging by US companies because despite their costs being equal or less than every other place for that product they charge more for it. Charging what the market will bear is not slimy - pretending that it is to cover the development costs of something where they only have to pay licencing cost is.
this girl goes to my high school.
SO PROUD.
(asian pride)
In the USA she would have been sent outside to play sports. All that sitting indoors and reading isn't good for people and they need to develop socially instead of doing nerdy stuff like curing cancer.
No sig today...
All that happens is the cancer cell is shown the article and told to read the title! Cell suicide ...the new age cure!
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
She's from Cupertino, California, USA..
How many journal articles has she published? She has to get on that shit pronto, 17 is almost too late to start racking up authorships and co-authorships! Chop chop, you lazy girl. You won't get tenure the way you're going!
Too bad your last grant proposal fell through because you forgot form 27B-6. You're a drain on this University. You're fired, get out!
Interesting, but from the context, I don't think the term "swiss-army knife" means what they think it means. "Swiss army knife" is an analogy for a single tool that combines multiple capabilities to be able to be used for a multitude of tasks, becoming an "all-purpose" tool itself. This one seems incredibly specific.
Doesn't matter. She's probably got one of those tiger moms, meaning she's not allowed to play, have friend, or do any of the things most Americans think a childhood should consist of.
Or maybe she just wasn't treated like a moron due to being young.
The general equation reads young = retard moron = spoonfeed simplified stuff until grown up to be an adult moron.
McDonalds ?
I already did this, I just didn't want to brag
there's an app for that?
I clicked through and scanned the individual and team winners for this contest. From the names and the pictures of the winners, Asian-Americans are the overwhelming majority of the winners. And, many are also accomplished musicians on multiple instruments. I, for one, am not surprised.
From TFA http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/competition/2011_winners.htm#7 linked to by TFA:
Angela Zhang
$100,000
Monta Vista High School, Cupertino, California
MENTOR: Dr. Zhen Cheng, Stanford University
Both of which were in the US last time I looked...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Well, then stop ranting and read the summary of her work? How stupid can one be? Knowing that others "did the same", citing them, pointing to the wikipedia article ... and being unable to read at the same time?
Her particles are not ment to CURE. They are ment to TRANSPORT the poison that is used to kill the cancer cells.
And to put it even more bluntly (sorry to rant but I can not get it): she got $ 100k as REWARD. Do you think the "guy" who gave it her is a "complete idiot"? Did you even notice who "the guy" is? Hint: Siemens. That is a small company in germany ... actually it has some minor irrelevant brach offices in a few countries in the world (190)
They barely have the money to operate this:
http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/competition.htm
Oki, end of ranting. The linekd article in this story and a few others (copied from each other) are very missleading. Not the nanoparticle but the drug it transports (salinomycin) performs the killing: http://www.inquisitr.com/165679/angela-zhang-cancer-research-siemens-competition-in-math-science-technology/
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I don't want to minimize the achievement of this high school student, but it does look like she is repeating work that was published several years ago. (If this had been completely original work, I would expect her to already be a research professor instead of a HS student.)
Look at Naomi Halas at Rice University (http://chemistry.rice.edu/FacultyDetail.aspx?RiceID=863). Her group has been engineering nanoparticles for > 5 years for the exact same application, "The Halas Nanoengineering Group is actively pursuing applications of nanoshells in biomedicine, in applications relating to ultrafast immunoassays, optically triggerable drug delivery, early stage cancer detection and photothermal cancer therapy."
One other point: this student attends Oak Ridge High School. How much do you bet she has a parent (or at least a close adviser) who works at Oak Ridge National Lab within their biological systems division.
And with what seems like Chinese surnames...
Interesting...
How cynical you all are..
This is the king-daddy of science fair type activities along with the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
Siemens is a big financial sponsor, which is needed, because while there's millions, if not billions, for freshman high school football, there's bupkis for science and engineering competition. Westinghouse used to sponsor it. Intel sponsors the ISEF. It's expensive to operate these sorts of things (hire a convention center, arrange for judges/reviewers, organize a zillion details, pay travel expenses for entrants)
You don't win this by being some lab assistant working under the direction of the great Dr. Prof. Wonderful, MD, FRS, PhD. It has to be YOUR work, developed by YOU, with YOUR ideas, and YOUR background research. The judging is quite rigorous (compare to sitting your orals for a PhD). Winning work in the STS or ISEF is PhD dissertation from a major university quality, just done by a high school student who overcame substantial burdens to be able to do it.
Sure, some folks get help (lab space, access to libraries, etc.) but you still have to do all your other regular school stuff: all those classes, homework, extra-curriculars for the college application, getting a drivers license. It's like doing a PhD dissertation on nights and weekends while you have a full time job. Sure, if you win, any college would be glad to have you, even if that's all you did, but only a few winners out of thousands in the hunt, and "lost at ISEF" isn't particularly impressive on your application, so you'd better have the sports teams and the clubs and the ECs, to show you're that "well-rounded person".
In any case, the entrant retains all intellectual property rights, and several people in the STS and ISEF last year had patents issued on what they were doing.
And she will benefit greatly from this: not only does she get the lump of cash (which is nice) but she essentially gets to go wherever she wants for school (where, now I'm going to be cynical, they will factor her recent wins into "family assets" when calculating the amount of her scholarship). But hey, she gets to study wherever she wants, and more to the point, she has a an awesome entree to meet more senior researchers, so she won't get stuck in the "freshman? You can help wash glassware in the lab" thing.
FWIW, this being SlashDot, Natalie Portman is another former winner.
> It appears that they have cured (or at least stopped progression of) breast cancer.
"cured" is a very big word when used to describe research which hasn't even reached the human trial stage yet. The particular research which is described in that "PR-bite" would seem to be far from capable of curing all cases of breast cancer. In at least some percentage of the patients, the cancer will evolve during treatment --- for example, stop expressing the targeted antigen (or more accurately, the treatment will fail to kill a small number of cells which already had this mutation, and these cells will later develop into more tumors)?
The article itself says that the targeted antigen (Her-2 --- gads, what a bad name for a breast cancer antigen) is only expressed in "up to" 30% of the cases of breast cancer, BTW. And the treatment is only an improved method of delivering cisplatin, which certainly doesn't cure all cases of breast cancer currently (i.e., some cancers manage to evolve immunity to it).
As Mr. A.E. use to say, "Imagination is more important than knowledge". How come a 17 y.o. person reaches this point in cancer research? From the dark side of my mind: Probably the "official" research, sponsored by labs,is more focused in creating drugs to sell to increase their income, than to effectively cure it. A cured person will not be a customer anymore....
"Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells"
Pfftt... anyone could have thought of that!
Nanoplatform Based, Combinational Therapy against Breast Cancer Stem Cells University of Georgia Principal Investigator: Jin Xie, Ph.D. Project Summary: This project is based on a novel nanoplatform that is comprised of an iron oxide nanoparticle core, an amine-rich intermediate layer, and an outside coating layer made of human serum albumin. In this project, the iron oxide nanoplatform is loaded with a cocktail of therapeutic agents (paclitaxel, salinomycin, and tariquidar or siRNA that targets MDR-1 gene) and is used to treat breast cancer.
Now check out http://nano.cancer.gov/about/meet/pathway_independence.asp#jxie
Jin Xie, Ph.D., focused his early research on the synthesis and surface modification of magnetic nanoparticles. As a postdoctoral researcher, he joined the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS), where he worked with Dr. Xiaoyuan Chen on developing inorganic nanoparticle-based probes for multimodal imaging.
Note that Dr. Chen is the guy whose lab this girl was working in. It appears that Dr. Jin Xie already won an award from the NIH in 2010 for the same idea that this girl won an award for in 2011.
so its a drug delivery mechanism then that is different, the article and title are misleading. you ranter ;)
Nanoplatform Based, Combinational Therapy against Breast Cancer Stem Cells University of Georgia Principal Investigator: Jin Xie, Ph.D. Project Summary: This project is based on a novel nanoplatform that is comprised of an iron oxide nanoparticle core, an amine-rich intermediate layer, and an outside coating layer made of human serum albumin. In this project, the iron oxide nanoplatform is loaded with a cocktail of therapeutic agents (paclitaxel, salinomycin, and tariquidar or siRNA that targets MDR-1 gene) and is used to treat breast cancer.
Note that Dr. Xie was working at the same Stanford lab as the girl. Anyone want to place any bets on which one of them was responsible for this project? Of course, bad reporting isn't surprising; we can't expect a reporter to take the time to google "magnetic nanoparticle cancer treatment imaging stanford" and spend a few minutes looking through the results, or some similar feat of heroic investigative super-journalism. No, the interesting thing to me is how when anyone tries to point out that the story is stupid and inaccurate, people invariably freak out and accuse you of being jealous etc. It seems that a great many people can't distinguish between criticizing the child vs. criticizing the work of the reporter who wrote the story about the child.
Many times society will look down on you as seen in the old expression "Children should be seen but not heard". Some do not realize the importance young people are to our society and to our future. So, if you are young, do not let anyone look down on you because you are young. Keep striving to make a change for the better in our society. That does not mean you have to develop the next cure, but seek to better your sphere of influence. Many of you are doing that, and you should be commended for doing so!
She can ALMOST afford four years of college at a top american university now.
We all just skip over them eh?
Are you sure she wasn't just designed in Cupertino, California, USA... but made by Foxconn in China?
Designing a particle which can be used to kill cancer cells is one thing. Mass producing it is something completely different. Your after all going to need millions of them per-treatment, and of course nature being so adapted it's likely people would need multiple treatments to be effective.
But still $100k. She should be granted a full scholarship to an institution of choice.
Cure cancer, only make 100k
... and who owning the patent?
I believe Rice University owns the patent ... for the last 10 years.
Throwing rocks at my neighbor Robbie Joyner