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."

Comments

Lousy t-shirt

[Artea]

Cure cancer, only make 100k

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[ozmanjusri]

Cure cancer, only make 100k

Well, it's not like she's invented a flying car, is it?

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[pntkl]

No, it sure isn't. Maybe she just saved that hypothetical inventor's life, on the other hand. I feel those erudite, yet lacking innovation, they deserve to be leveraged against. That is, considering how often true innovators are stifled and devalued. Stuff like this, if a successful innovation can solve a trillion dollar problem with a few dollars--said innovator should feel free to offer it to all sides. Maybe you don't ask for a trillion dollars, although, you could ask for a lot more than $100K.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Anonymous Coward]

And football coaches get a million plus a year.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[c0lo]

Cure cancer, only make 100k

... and who owning the patent?

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[dadioflex]

No, it sure isn't. Maybe she just saved that hypothetical inventor's life, on the other hand. I feel those erudite, yet lacking innovation, they deserve to be leveraged against. That is, considering how often true innovators are stifled and devalued. Stuff like this, if a successful innovation can solve a trillion dollar problem with a few dollars--said innovator should feel free to offer it to all sides. Maybe you don't ask for a trillion dollars, although, you could ask for a lot more than $100K.

Your comment feels like a puzzle I must unravel.

The 100k is a prize. There is probably an awful lot more development to do before this becomes an actual treatment, and there is nothing to say the talented winner won't earn ten times, or a hundred times the prize money by the time that treatment is fully developed. I'd say her career is almost assured at this stage, and that alone is probably worth millions.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Anonymous Coward]

Cure cancer, only make 100k

She didn't "win" the money for curing cancer. It was the prize money for the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Could have been 100 for any field

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying that she could have made more by inventing a cancer-*giving* nano-particle?.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Anonymous Coward]

The question I've been asking and can't seem to find an answer for is:

By entering her particle as a project in this competition and accepting the 100k... Did she transfer any/all ownership of the IP to a drug company?

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Hadlock]

The Nobel Peace Prize pays out pretty well; generally $1-3 million USD depending on market variations.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[TheRaven64]

The Nobel Peace Prize pays out pretty well; generally $1-3 million USD depending on market variations.

So, somewhere between 5 and 15% of the golden parachute that Carly Fiorina got for running HP into the ground (on top of her salary)?

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[GameboyRMH]

Aw man this thread is depressing...

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[e3m4n]

in the UK she'd probably get awarded knighthood. Ive always felt that those who make this game changing discoveries in the US should get something similar to this. Maybe a lifetime of no personal income tax? if not her, whoever does come up with the total cure for cancer is likely to get some small-prize announcement and that would be the end of the story by the news media. Meanwhile we will hear year after year sports announcements about some athlete making 30 million a year who, by the way, did NOT manage to cure cancer.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Reverand Dave]

Or a pill to cure ED. Where the hell are your priorities anyhow?

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Reverand Dave]

yeah, what he said... Now I wish I had cancer.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Dragon Bait]

The Nobel Peace Prize pays out pretty well; generally $1-3 million USD depending on market variations.

So, somewhere between 5 and 15% of the golden parachute that Carly Fiorina got for running HP into the ground (on top of her salary)?

And sadly, given the long term damage she did to the company (and even more damage she could have done if she'd stayed) it was probably money well spent to get rid of her. Too bad they haven't figured out someone to replace her with.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[LordLimecat]

Maybe a lifetime of no personal income tax?

Thats a really bad road to start down.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[mcgrew]

whoever does come up with the total cure for cancer is likely to get some small-prize announcement and that would be the end of the story by the news media

It's doubtful anyone will come up with a "silver bullet" that will cure all cancers, because all cancers are different. It appears that they have cured (or at least stopped progression of) breast cancer. From an item I saw on the TV news the other night, it looks as though this will work even after the cancer has metathesized and spread to other parts of the body. The next step is combining it with radiation and other treatments. Not yet FDA approved, still experimental.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Most likely the competition fine print is that anything submitted by the contest becomes the property of Siemens, so basically, Siemens gets to file a patent that could be worth trillions by making a 100k upfront investment. Not saying the winner's career isn't going to be rosy, by she isn't going to get a dime more for that invention.

BTW, if she was smart, then she should have filed a patent on her own and sold it to Siemens for far more money.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Careful you don't over-extrapolate. She did not just "cure cancer", people are being facetious. She came up with a new, slightly different method of fighting cancer, which should be more effective and should yield more information to doctors that are monitoring treatment. This is significant, but don't go crazy.

Knighthood is cool and all, I wouldn't mind a "sir" title, but its just decorative. Nowadays the knights are so watered down with anybody the queen thinks is special, it doesn't mean that much.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[e3m4n]

perhaps you're right. I just think there needs to be some decent amount of hero worship for these sort of individuals. Its totally pathetic that some athlete gets paid millions to play a game as a career and gets huge amount of hero worship. Yet some inventor or small group of scientists are going to come up with the next breakthrough that transforms the cost of energy into something so cheap its practically free for everyone; and they might get 15min of fame and thats it. Personally I think if there were more emphasis put on scientific achievement the way we put on whether someone can make a shot consistently from the 3pt line, we'd be much further along in our breakthroughs.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Zaphod The 42nd]

There's always a bigger fish. By making arbitrary comparisons, you can make anything seem meaningless taken out of context. She won a STEM competition, 100,000 is a pretty good size for a big science fair. There's nothing that stops her from making more money off this, that is just a start.

Especially if that other /. article about medical patents doesn't get shot down by SCOTUS... *sigh*

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Zaphod The 42nd]

We can appreciate that a girl did good science at a young age and got a nice reward, and will no doubt get bigger rewards for her science over time (possibly for this very invention, we don't know that she sacrificed the rights to it for the competition) and we can complain about people ruining our economy without taking the two entirely out of context and making arbitrary comparisons. *sigh* oh, moral relativism. You shouldn't be happy about that new car because kids are starving in Ethiopia. Nobody should ever be happy, ever, in fact, so long as one person on earth is upset.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[DigiTechGuy]

That's waht the market will bear. I think it's retarded they make so much, but Americans are more concerned with season tickets in good seats than important issues. Not that football is bad (I have no interest in it), but there's no reason to ignore everything else going on around you in politics, sciencem etc. just because you enjoy a particular sport.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[evilRhino]

We as Americans rejected knighthoods, nobilities, and titles when we rebelled against the Crown. Tax holidays are reserved for "Job Creators". Not people that actually create jobs, but people that have so much money already they could hypothetically create jobs if they wanted to.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[mcgrew]

You don't need a pill to cure ED, all you need to do is get rid of the ugly broad you can't get it up for and find a woman that looks a little more female and a little less ghastly.

That's why your close vision deteriorates when you get old -- so you won't see how ugly your wife's gotten. I never needed viagra at all before I got my CrystaLens implant, I still don't need it with a 40 year old. A woman my own age? Give me two pills!

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[wiedzmin]

You seem to be making a direct connection between "hero worship" and getting paid millions of dollars for some reason. Knighthood does not come with millions of dollars (in fact, you pretty much have to have made at least one on your own before you get knighted)... Nobel prizes do on the other hand - maybe she can win one of those.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[FirstNoel]

Lol, you're my new hero!

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[wiedzmin]

It's doubtful anyone will come up with a "silver bullet" that will cure all...

I can't help but wonder if similar words were uttered before the invention of penicillin.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Nethemas the Great]

Actually, penicillin is only effective for a large subset of Gram-positive bacterial infections not Gram-negative.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[quintin3265]

That may be the case now, but I don't believe that medical pioneers will be so undervalued 10 years from now.

Right now, the social media companies are receiving all sorts of attention as the leading "innovators," as if creating a place to post on friends' walls and share pictures is actually so valuable. Meanwhile, a huge amount of information on biology is just waiting to explode as computing power becomes cheaper and cheaper.

People pay for what they value. Today, people think that disease, disability, and death are just natural occurrences that just need to be accepted. Once someone finds a cure for cancer, or Alzheimer's disease, or any one of a number of diseases, people will suddenly realize that the idea that people are born, get sick, grow old, and die no longer has to be the norm. The superstars will then be the people who cured blindness or who slowed aging, and things like facebook will rightfully be looked upon as useful tools, but not as huge innovations that are worth billions of dollars.

It will just take people to see that medicine can actually make them feel better, not just postpone disease as today's primitive treatments do. Between the time the first major cure is discovered and aging is eliminated, people will respect medical researchers a lot more, because they will realize that they have a chance of making it to the point where suffering is a thing of the past.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[hacksoncode]

You know... we already have flying cars. They're called helicopters.

You're just complaining that they're too expensive and difficult to use.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[Gr8Apes]

Carly didn't deep-six HP, that would be Apotheker. He almost single-handedly killed the company, doing more harm in a week than even Reed Hastings to a viable business. He should win some sort of award for that... wait, that would be wrong. The only person I can think of that was worse was Darl McBride, of SCO infamy.

If you're going to accuse someone of screwing up a company, at least get the right someone.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[cavebison]

I'd love to see that happen. Strangely, it used to be the case in the past, or at least that's the impression I have from watching docos about Einstein etc. Weren't inventors and scientists more in the news way back then?

Same with poets and philosophers, there was a time when they were also semi-famous. Nowadays though, the best a scientist can hope for is making a name by annoying lots of people, like Dawkins.

Re:Lousy t-shirt

[bar-agent]

yeah, what he said... Now I wish I had cancer.

Well, tough luck, a high-school kid just cured it.

Back in my day, we had real diseases, germs that'd sink their teeth into ya and chow down! Walk into the wrong village and the next thing you know beak-faced enforcers were burning the town and you didn't leave 'til three-quarters of the village was dead and you had pox scars on your wing-wong and a pinky that dissolved away.

And we liked it that way! Because those scars showed you been there and done that, and God himself reached out his hand and saved your sorry ass. The survivors couldn't beat the chicks off with a stick! And with half the population dying from one damn thing or another, there was always a cheap farm job or an empty cottage to take her home to.

But nowadays, any snot-nosed punk with a gene sequencer and a little brother for a test subject can cure the Black Ebola Cancer Plague! You kids don't know how lucky you've got it. Asthma? Allergies?! Might as well have a splinter in your finger for all that diseases do these days!

Now get off my lawn!

Biology Question

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Biology Question

[ceoyoyo]

Colitis and Crohn's disease are autoimmune, so yes, they're going to be very difficult to cure. Cancer and AIDS at least have well identified targets. Wipe out all the cancerous cells or virus particles and you're done. Most autoimmune diseases have the complication that you're still not sure exactly what's wrong, and even if you did know, the cells that are causing the problems are usually also necessary for staying alive.

Re:Biology Question

[zill]

Because cancer actually refers to a huge group of different diseases. They share the common characteristic of unregulated cell growth but they are distinct diseases nevertheless. Each specific type of cancer don't actually receive disproportionate "newstime and general attention".

Re:Biology Question

[damonlab]

I would argue that breast cancer receives disproportionate "newstime and general attention" compared to other types of cancer such as prostate cancer or skin cancer.

Re:Biology Question

[Intropy]

Similarly, a lot of effort that goes into "AIDS research" is really more widely applicable virus research. Finding something practical that cured a major class of virus would be world changing on the level of antibiotics.

Re:Biology Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Crohn is not an autoimmine disease, it's a bacterial infection, if you wish to call it anything you can say it's an autoinflammatory disease.

The fact that there is still this level of confusion means there needs to be more research.

Re:Biology Question

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as difficult to cure, it depends on what you mean.

At this point in time it's very likely that Crohn is either E. Coli or MAP. While they are harder to eradicate than tuberculosis or leprosy, since the MAP bug lives deep within intercellular walls, it should be possible with the right antibiotics. There are already tests with TB cocktails that target MAP.

However, there is little interest from the medical industry because these antibiotics are actually not expensive, and giving people infliximab ( makes them a whole lot more.

Many people who have crohn are boosting their immune system (which like I said contradcits the autoimmune theory which is bullocks at this point), Naltrexone has been shown to work for crohn and increase levels of Vitamin D seems to also have a beneficial effect.

Then there are complications, like fibrosis, which need to be looked at also, because it's a very common side-effect when the intestinal walls contract due to scar tissue and increased collagen.

ALL OF THESE THINGS are within reach of being cured, if only there was some money put into them.

Re:Biology Question

[bill_mcgonigle]

The fact that there is still this level of confusion means there needs to be more research.

They identified the MAP bacteria a few years back, but are still discovering SNP's that contribute to the inability to fight it off.

Killing MAP takes a cocktail of antibiotic drugs still. Nasty buggers.

Re:Biology Question

[mlow82]

To be completely fair, breast cancer is in the breasts whereas prostate cancer is in the anus.

Re:Biology Question

[Anonymous Coward]

To be completely fair, breast cancer is in the breasts whereas prostate cancer is in the anus.

You're thinking about (rectal and) anal cancer. Prostate cancer is not in the anus, it's in the prostate. Easiest way to examine prostate cancer is through the anus, but that is totally unrelated.

With your kind of thinking, you could as well call prostate cancer for penis cancer, or stomach cancer.

Re:Biology Question

[TapeCutter]

That's true, but it's also true of a lot of other drugs, eg anti-venom and anti-flu. In each case you're developing tools for examining how a particular "species" works and some of those tools will work on a wide variety species (such as immediately pouring vinegar on insect, spider, and jelly fish stings), over time this tends to flatten the learning curve for the next species you examine.

Re:Biology Question

[sg_oneill]

Because if you cure cancer (Somehow...... cancer really refers to a vast number of genetic defects each with its own kink), or AIDS (perhaps more likely) you'll save billions of lives over the course of history.

Malaria however is another one desparately in need of research. Kills more than aids and yet gets a fraction of the research dollars.

Re:Biology Question

[Joce640k]

Antibiotics and viruses don't belong in the same sentence.

Re:Biology Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, thank you! I was not aware of this bit of information about Crohn's! It seems that my physician is not very well informed...

I would very much appreciate if you (or someone else) could post more information and links about current research regarding this nasty disease.

Re:Biology Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think he wasn't referring to "curing" viruses with antibiotics. If you reread his post, I'm sure you'll see what he's saying is that curing a major class of virus (such as the HIV retrovirus) would be as world changing as the discovery of penicillin.

Re:Biology Question

[thasmudyan]

Crohn is not an autoimmine disease, it's a bacterial infection

While this is technically not a lie, it's at least a very misleading statement that obfuscates the underlying problem. Crohn is a disease of the immune system. Newer research indicates that it might be a deficiency in some immune cells' ability to produce immuno-modulating agents that are needed for a coordinated response to bacteria occuring inside the colon. This allows those bacteria to stage an attack on the colon's tissue. The bacterial infection itself is, however, just a symptom of the immune defect.

Re:Biology Question

[Anonymous Coward]

pubmed.org is your friend : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21254832

Re:Biology Question

[TheRaven64]

Yes they do, and in exactly the way that the grandparent said. Antibiotics (and antiseptics before them) made a massive change to medicine. The discovery of penicillin turned a large number diseases from always-fatal to mildly irritating. A broad-spectrum antiviral would have a similarly huge impact.

Re:Biology Question

[rufty_tufty]

"As for AIDS, well, I think it was because of those overpaid actors that gave it a high profile."
Also because it is scary as hell. A silent killer that could be lurking that you pick up during a leisure activity we all love and try to do as much of as possible.
I think it's the silent thing that scares people the most. At least with other deadly diseases it is kind of obvious that someone has it.
Yes there are plenty of things you could do to protect yourself, but it does have that scary what if.

I also think part of the fear comes from the fact that you could argue it targets what some people would call immoral life style choices, i.e. promiscuity, homosexuality, drug usage etc. Conservatives fear it for the immorality it represents to them and liberals fear it because it is a risk for the life style choices they want to allow people to make.* I do wonder if it had a different discovery history and had never been known as a "Gay Plague" then would it have the same status now? As I understand it if it had not appeared as the Gay movement was just gaining mainstream acceptance would things have been different? What if it had been discovered in different circumstances and those infected had been quarantined? What if it had been slightly less widespread, what if we already had basic anti-viral treatments at that time?
What other high profile viral disease would you rather champion anti-viral research?

*Okay I'm using American polarised political views here to make a point which I utterly despise, but you get what I'm trying to say.

Re:Biology Question

[plurgid]

No, it isn't. Otherwise, it'd be a lot easier to cure.
Correlated to the presence of MAP bacteria, yes. Symptoms the result of a bacterial infection: absolutely not.

Re:Biology Question

[Anonymous Coward]

A silent killer that could be lurking that you pick up during a leisure activity we all love and try to do as much of as possible.

You have obviously not met my wife...

Re:Biology Question

[wisnoskij]

"Wipe out all the cancerous cells or virus particles and you're done."

That seems like a pretty bad endpoint. Doesn't cancer often come back even after being completely wiped out and unless you are saying that you are born with cancer does it not come into existence because of something?
I do not think that cancer is some virus or bacteria, and wiping out the effect does not seem like a very effective solution.

Re:Biology Question

[amcdiarmid]

ooh, he said breasts... Is it really a suprise that breast cancer receives disproportionate "Newstime"?

Almost 100% of the population have one (~50% of the population have 2, therefor 100% of the population have one: I learnt if from Faux News.), and well .. Breasts.

Re:Biology Question

[MrNiceguy_KS]

... a leisure activity we all love and try to do as much of as possible.

You're talking about heroin, right?

Re:Biology Question

[Andy Dodd]

In some cases, cancer could suddenly "crop up" again - but usually, if it returns, it's because you THINK it was completely wiped out but it wasn't.

Re:Biology Question

[Sez Zero]

AGreed. I'm always confused at the month of pink worn by everyone when it is called "Breast Cancer Awareness". Really, everyone is aware of it by now.

It is boobies for goodness sakes!

Re:Biology Question

[wcrowe]

Many more people are killed worldwide by simple diarrhea. All that is needed to cure it is clean drinking water. We could save over two million lives each year for less than what we're spending on HIV research. Too bad diarrhea is neither fashionable or tragic. There are no "brown ribbon" campaigns for diarrhea.

Re:Biology Question

[the gnat]

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.

Actually, while AIDS hasn't been truly cured, it is now a manageable illness in the First World due to a number of extremely successful therapies. The major effort now is devoted to preventing it entirely through use of vaccines.

Cancer is much more complicated because it isn't one disease - the various cell types all behave extremely differently, ranging from prostate cancer which is treatable (and may not even be noticed in some cases) to liver cancer which is deadly. And it's not just which part of the body, either; the types of mutations that they end up with may be equally varied in some cases. Some therapies offer significantly better chances of survival for specific cancers: Gleevec for CML is one of the most successful, and there is finally a drug that can at least slow down melanoma. But it's a long, hard slog, and no one expects that a single therapy will ever cure even a majority of cases.

Re:Biology Question

[NeutronCowboy]

Actually, 100% of the population have two breasts. 50% of the population have just better developed breasts.

Re:Biology Question

[Amouth]

thank you very much

Re:Biology Question

[wisnoskij]

How would you know?
If the doctors looked and said that you have absolutely no cancer left and then 3 years latter it is back, how would the doctors know that they missed some or if it came back for some other reason?
So you are saying that cancer (in your opinion) in general does not really just appear because of some reason? Cancer just grows from other cancer? and nothing causes it in the first place, just ???random chance??? and if you can remove all of it the only reason you will have a reoccurrence is if you get unlucky enough to have that random chance happen again?

In my opinion cancer is not a bacteria or virus and unless it uses crazy star trek temporal mechanics to cause itself then it is simply an effect and removing an effect is doomed to be ineffective long term.

Re:Biology Question

[turtledawn]

How would you know? You compare the genetic profile of the new tumor and the old and if they're the same (or closely similar, with a base mutation profile that fits while allowing for some subsequent mutation - cancer cells' DNA replication procedures being obviously a bit off) well gosh, they missed a cell. It's pretty easy to do, after all, we're talking on the order of a few microns. As for how it can come back after some period of time, typically one only stays on cancer-suppressing drugs for a few years, for very good reasons relating to side effects and decreasing efficacy.

It would be fairly uncommon though not impossible to have multiple spontaneous oncogenic changes in a single individual, and if that did occur, they were likely exposed to some nasty stuff at some point in their life.

Re:Biology Question

[Prune]

This is why Alexander Fleming is the most important scientist of the 20th Century; not, as was usually voted in the top-??? lists, Einstein.

Re:Biology Question

[Anarki2004]

E-cigs are capable of delivering a great deal more nicotine than a traditional cigarette. It all depends on the concentration/density of the e-juice you put in your atomizer. If what you say is true about e-cigs not working then it is probably not the nicotine that offers the relief, but some other chemical.

Re:Biology Question

[BlueParrot]

Malaria however is another one desparately in need of research. Kills more than aids and yet gets a fraction of the research dollars.

Tragic fact:
Malaria doesn't have any non-human carriers, and it doesn't last long in the mosquitoes that transmit it. Thus if we ensured everybody that needed it could get treatment for malaria, the disease would likely die out.

The same is true for tuberculosis.

Re:Biology Question

[ceoyoyo]

Cancer is normal cells that become damaged, lose their internal checks and proliferate out of control. If you kill all the cancer cells, the cancer is gone. You might be predisposed to developing cancer and do so again, but if you kill off all the cancerous cells, that cancer is gone.

Cancer treatments usually focus on reducing the number of cancerous cells and hoping the immune system will handle the rest. Surgery very rarely gets rid of everything, which is why it's usually followed up with radiation or chemotherapy. Even those therapies may leave cancer cells alive, particularly if the cancer has metastasized.

The point is, in cancer the problem is clear and, at least in theory, identifiable. We don't understand autoimmune diseases nearly as well.

Re:Biology Question

[ceoyoyo]

We know the basics of how cancer originates. Something, either radiation, a chemical, a replication error or other damage causes multiple failures in a cell's regulatory pathways. The cell then replicates out of a control. Additionally, the immune system has to fail to deal with it. Cancer isn't a bacteria or virus (although some cancers can be caused by them). It's not Star Trek temporal mechanics but it is, most definitely, random chance, weighted by genetic predisposition. A cosmic ray hits just the right atom in the right bit of DNA and there you go.

Re:Biology Question

[MenThal]

If you'd like similar "newstime and general attention" to the cancer of your choice, now would be a good time to start acting.

Which is why we just had "Movember" - Moustache November - for precisely prostate cancer awareness, no?

I just shaved mine off after a long month of itchy upper lip...

Designed or Created?

[edibobb]

I believe she only designed the nanoparticle. Actually creating it comes next semester.

How does it recognize cancel stemcell?

[shas3n]

TFA is sparse on tech details. So how exactly nano-particles know if a cell is cancerous or not?

Re:How does it recognize cancel stemcell?

[c0lo]

TFA is sparse on tech details. So how exactly nano-particles know if a cell is cancerous or not?

Some (very sparse) details on the GWU site

In her project, Angela aimed to design a targeted gold and iron oxide-based nanoparticle with the potential to eradicate cancer stem cells through a controlled delivery of the drug salinomycin to the site of the tumor.

Re:How does it recognize cancel stemcell?

[c0lo]

Maybe this would help? (article as old as 2007).

Targeting the nanotubes solely to cancer cells is the major challenge in advancing the therapy, Curley says. Research is under way to bind the nanotubes to antibodies, peptides or other agents that in turn target molecules expressed on cancer cells. To complicate matters, most such molecules also are expressed in normal tissue.

Re:How does it recognize cancel stemcell?

[c0lo]

And this

Nanoparticles are so small they are measured in nanometers (a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter); many have diameters in the range of 5–200 nm. At that size, the particles are small enough to evade uptake by the liver and spleen, enabling them to stay in the bloodstream longer. They’re also able to take advantage of a unique opportunity: they can fit through the holes in the walls of the permeable, or “leaky,” blood vessels that tend to form in tumors. When nanoparticles are injected intravenously, they flow right on through normal blood vessels, which have tight walls without holes, but selectively diffuse through the permeable vessels out into tumors.

Re:How does it recognize cancel stemcell?

[ZankerH]

Kill them all, let the autopsy sort them out.

Re:How does it recognize cancel stemcell?

[sgt scrub]

It is probably for the best. In today's climate she could potentially get sued for infringing on a method used in her research.

Re:How does it recognize cancel stemcell?

[draconx]

Nanoparticles are so small they are measured in nanometers (a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter)

Except that they're off by several orders of magnitude. A nanometre is a billionth (short scale) of a metre: that is, 1/1000000000 (10^-9) metres.

Re:How does it recognize cancel stemcell?

[c0lo]

Nanoparticles are so small they are measured in nanometers (a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter)

Except that they're off by several orders of magnitude. A nanometre is a billionth (short scale) of a metre: that is, 1/1000000000 (10^-9) metres.

Except the only "mistake" they did was using the millimeters to express the nanometer (instead of the meter) - as a consequence, metric system purists choke intellectually.

The 100k was a ripoff

[WaterDamage]

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.

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[EETech1]

I can see it now...

"I cured cancer... (and after paying off my student loans) all I got was this damn T-shirt"

If it works, I hope she gets properly compensated!

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[ksd1337]

I'm not betting on it. The entry contracts for the competition probably contained some intellectual property clause or another.

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[atari2600a]

at least she'll get a career & probably at least an honorary degree or scholarship out of it?

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[L4t3r4lu5]

So what? If this is a cure for cancer, I would consider it a crime against humanity to keep it locked behind intellectual property law.

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[MaskedSlacker]

You think anyone who's opinion is politically relevant gives a fuck about that?

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[gajop]

Even if it was, it's ok if it'd be kept behind patents and intellectual property law as long as they'd sell it, and I bet they would.
Or do you think 100k is what you get when you curse cancer?

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[L4t3r4lu5]

If I discovered or created a cure for cancer, it would be released under a free license already and posted on BitTorrent before I even told the competition organiser.

The thought of bargaining for your life with a pharmaceutical company makes me feel physically ill.

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[gajop]

This has nothing to do with whether medical care should be funded by you directly, or someone else (the government).
And I don't quite get why you assume that research in medicine (or any other that field for that matter) should by default become public property, it's definitely not cheap.

This is a result of hard work and ingenuity, and unless you reward that, by allowing people to make a living through research, you will never incentivize people to do it.
I would much rather have millionaires and billionaires coming from research rather than management of world fast food restaurants.

I'd rather promote people funding research knowing full well they can make money out of it, if it means curing many of the world diseases.

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Please stop trolling and take the time to understand what is going on first. This isn't a "Cure for cancer", this is a slightly improved treatment. And we don't know for a fact that she sacrificed her IP, this is just a big science fair in which she blew away the competition and won a prize. Calm down! The competition is open to much more than just medicine or biology, it includes math and computer science as well. So this isn't just a big pharma attempt to cash in on kids. It is a science competition. The winner gets a SCHOLARSHIP, not even just a cash prize. RTFA and stop making noise before you do research.

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[Zaphod The 42nd]

See: recent /. article on the issue of medical patents, which SCOTUS seems to have sadly skipped over...

I've been wanting to develop a cure for cancer, and then patent it and hold it prisoner, so that the public will finally realize how egregious this is and overturn it.

Re:The 100k was a ripoff

[ksd1337]

Then once you realize just what a great position you are in to become a billionaire, you might reconsider.

Details Theory? Experiment? Treatment?

[Zebai]

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.

Re:Details Theory? Experiment? Treatment?

[ulski]

you're right, but I did find the siemens announcement here http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/competition/2011_winners.htm#2

Did SHE do it?

[pieisgood]

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.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[phantomfive]

Frequently, when a person under 20 accomplishes something noteworthy in the world, it is a direct result of the influence of parents, teachers, coaches, and others in their lives, not of their own action. It's just too hard to figure out all that stuff on your own, at the same time you are figuring out life in general.

I'm not saying this is always the case, just in the vast majority that I've observed.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[GodfatherofSoul]

I'm with you on this one. Don't a lot of researchers give their assistants first-billing?

Re:Did SHE do it?

[wvmarle]

Well like all research it of course builds upon work from others. Those PhD researchers themselves usually work in a team, exchanging ideas and work results, in the process teaching each other about various aspects of the work, giving each other new suggestions on how to do stuff, etc. Sometimes the view of an outsider can be very enlightening.

To move on in research and make new discoveries, someone has to come up with a new idea, and that someone (or someone else) has to work out that idea. That idea may appear to be a little improvement, later unexpectedly working out to something great.

Indeed in this case I wouldn't be surprised if it works out roughly like that: experienced researcher walks around with various ideas in his head, gets a student assistant, and then gives that student assistant one of those ideas to work out. And then this happens to be a smart student that gets a promising idea to work on which actually works out surprisingly well.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely. Everyone should get their applause and their grant money here - but some serious thought needs to go into exactly what the hell happened when a high school student even has a shot at cracking a code like this. Most people are buried beneath a steaming pile of banality during their high school years. They're prepping student body political campaigns, writing papers on To Kill a Mockingbird, and trying to figure out how to dress in a way that will yield satisfying relationships.

There was a kid who graduated from my University at age 18 a few years ago with a Pre-Med degree. The first thing I thought was, "How sad that so few people are given the opportunity." We've studied development and neurogenesis to the point now that we know the difference between accidental happenstance and concerted purposive design. If more people were given the appropriate feedback early on about their own capacities and worth, this kind of functionalizing of young minds would be the baseline of education and not the one in a billion pot-shot it comes across as. We're totally selling ourselves short by shoveling Harry Potter and prom flower ribbons down our kids throats.

And for fuck's sake people... NO, a teenage girl did not just singlehandedly cure cancer. There is absolutely zero chance that she has a working understanding of quantum mechanical wave equation interpretations for molecular orbitals underpinning protein formation, let alone cell development and receptor pathways for the thousands of types of cells and their reproductive signaling constructs. The confounding issues of differentiating between self and non-self, histocompatibility and regulatory mechanism compatibility... they're not trivial. Medical doctors and academic researchers spend careers scratching at the surface of extremely narrow cases, and rarely find purchase on topics that are universally generalizable. Most all of them never produce replicable experimental designs towards deepening knowledge, just tiny slivers of insight into particular scenarios.

If this girl actually did run across the magic words and concepts that produced something workable, it is still extremely disingenuous to describe her as a "high school student" ... the ammunition one needs to acquire to even begin firing shots off in the right direction is never provided until midway through a Pre-Medical undergraduate major - at a good University. "High schools" around the world don't begin to describe this stuff. What you would be seeing is the triumph of home-schooling, autodidacticism, private tutoring, mentoring, nepotism, etc... the exact polar opposite of public education models. If everyone had to "get it" before the class could move on, this kind of student performance would be impossible.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[angel'o'sphere]

Frequently, when a person under 20 accomplishes something noteworthy in the world, it is a direct result of the influence of parents, teachers, coaches, and others in their lives, not of their own action. It's just too hard to figure out all that stuff on your own, at the same time you are figuring out life in general.

I'm not saying this is always the case, just in the vast majority that I've observed.

And how many cases exactly do you have observed?

I have observed none, but have heard about a lot. In general the parents have no clue about the topic their offsprings are working in. Their teachers only put the foundation and can assist in "library research" as the young student/researcher is far ahead in knowledge than his parent/mentor.

Someone under 20 is "figuring life"?? In what niche world do you live?

The world in general would be much better off if young people had more options "to do something" instead of being silenced by TV and video games to keep them out of the way.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[s_p_oneil]

It's a good question, but it's not too hard to imagine that while standing on the shoulders of giants, she spotted something he missed. Would she have spotted it without him? Definitely not. Would he have spotted it without her? Perhaps not. It is often a lot easier for someone with a different perspective to spot something new when you've been staring at it for 20 years. Or if nothing else, to ask questions that challenge assumptions you've built over the years.

OTOH, it's also not too hard to imagine him giving her credit in exchange for sex. ;-) I'd say it's about a 50/50 chance one way or the other.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Yeah, all entries to the competition have PHD professors sponsoring them. (And probably checking the math, doing 60% of the work and theory too.) Don't get me wrong, here in America it is impressive that she would even CARE about science at this point. Our education system beats it out of you as fast as it can. But she didn't cure cancer, that is blatantly misinforming, she just helped develop a new theoretical treatment which would be more useful and informative as it was administered, and I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have gotten off the ground without the PHD assistance. Again, not to undervalue her work, this is very impressive.

But there's this hero worship ingrained in our culture, we want to believe that certain people are wunderkids just 1,000x more skilled and knowledgeable than everybody else around, and we build up pedestals to put them on. We're all about obsessing over rock stars, atheletes, celebrities, and we act like these people have some magical immense talent that was god's gift, instead of the reality that they just have lots of skill that they developed over time, because they focused entirely on one subject. Eddie Van Halen said the reason he got so good at guitar was because his brother would go out to party, and he'd stay home practicing guitar. When his brother returned at 4 in the morning, he'd still be practicing. But we see him on a music video and we go "oh wow, he's so good at guitar! He's a rock god!"

Re:Did SHE do it?

[turtledawn]

We never see this kind of bullshit statement when it's some teenage guy who wins these prizes. Yes, she has an advisor. So does every single PhD candidate in the country, and no one questions their work. In fact, those students are often fighting to have their work recognized at all!

Re:Did SHE do it?

[nasor]

And then this happens to be a smart student that gets a promising idea to work on which actually works out surprisingly well.

The question is, did that step ever happen? Or was her project based entirely on the ideas of a PhD researcher? It appears that all the ideas described in this article actually came from a Dr. Jin Xie, who was working at the same Stanford lab at the same time as this girl. Check out http://nano.cancer.gov/action/programs/pathway.asp .

Re:Did SHE do it?

[phantomfive]

Bobby Fischer, Judit Polgar, Gata Kamsky, Tiger Woods, Mozart, Beethoven, Michell Wie, Bill Gates, Michael Phelps, Yuja Wang, the list goes on. It doesn't matter how much you want to be like Kim Yuna, if your parents (or someone) don't take you to the ice rink, you're not going to learn to skate. Who do you know that has accomplished anything at a young age without support?

The world in general would be much better off if young people had more options "to do something" instead of being silenced by TV and video games to keep them out of the way.

I feel like you're just trying to argue because this in no way relates to what I said, but yeah, you're probably right.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[wvmarle]

That's what I said: she gets an idea to work on. As in: the idea is given to her by some supervisor, who thinks it may be interesting to look a bit deeper into it, and then it appears to be a very promising idea for a change.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[Rich0]

Yup - the real advantage in our society is being able to get picked. This seems a lot like the selection process that takes place at the animal shelter - the selective advantage is not based on survivability, but the ability to get picked by a good benefactor.

Sure, you get the odd case of individual achievement, but in many cases those who are ahead were chosen to be such.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[Rich0]

If I saw a teenage boy taking about visibility on MRI and Photoacoustic imaging my first assumption would be that they had help. This is graduate-level stuff. In fact, before even reading your post I had read the summaries of the other award-winners and that was my impression in all cases.

This just isn't science-fair stuff.

From experience with my kids and school projects 95% of them are tests of parental ability and willingness to spend time on the project. It is rare to see a middle school student handed a project they can actually complete based on skills and knowledge obtained at school. Of course parents should be involved at some level, but I've seen many projects that simply required the parent to basically do the whole thing and just explain to the kid what was going on the whole time. Either that, or let the kid give it his best shot and end up at the bottom of the pile. Just another arms race...

Re:Did SHE do it?

[sustik]

I do not want to sound jealous. But I probably am. She must be very smart and clearly stand out from her peers. However...

I have seen the projects at our university for the Siemens competition and I got a feeling of... but enough of that. Instead, I would really love to hear comments by the authors of the following paper submitted in 2007:

Multi-Functional Nanoparticles and Their Role in Cancer Drug Delivery – A Review
Priya Pathak and V. K. Katiyar

Note the operative word "review" in the title, indicating substantial earlier work. It would be great to understand how this new contribution fits into the picture.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[mcgrew]

is a direct result of the influence of parents, teachers, coaches, and others in their lives, not of their own action. It's just too hard to figure out all that stuff on your own

Well, I wasn't doing PhD level work, but when I was a kid I didn't have anyone helping me; it was the library that I learned from, not any of my teachers. Hell, I had a science paper graded A+ because the teacher couldn't understand it.

Nobody told me how to turn a $10 transistor radio into a $200 guitar fuzzbox using $2 worth of parts and a soldering iron.

And I'm FAR from the smartest guy on slashdot. I'm downright retarded compared to some of the people here.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[wasme]

At least in universities, yes.

I've read a lot on the internet (especially when a science kook is claiming some big discovery) about people being afraid to share ideas or work with others because 'they'll steal it!'

But the reality is that professors almost always give primary credit to their assistants and students - even undergrads - (in the form of listing them first in the authors list of a paper submission). Now, of course there are the odd exceptions to this - unscrupulous researchers who take primary credit for everything they touch. But they are very much the exception, not the rule. And you can avoid these type of people simply by first previewing their own publication history. Typically one gets primary or secondary author status early in their careers and slide down the authors list as time goes on.

There is often good reason for this. A tenured professor may have half a dozen or more grad students at any one time. Plus a post-doc or two, and maybe a couple of undergrads serious about doing research too. The professor can't possibly be heavily involved in all of the projects under their supervision. Instead they are there to provide initial ideas, high level guidance (their experience can be especially valuable - they know the field better than you do and so can point you at previous research, other people that can help, important variables to consider, etc.), and name recognition which helps students' work to stand out more. Professors also provide access to resources and shield assistants and students from university bureaucracy (getting ethics clearances and such). Plus professors are drafted into that very bureaucracy to help run their department or school government or whatever. And constantly chasing grant money. Oh, and some of them also teach. ::P

Since they're so busy students often *are* the primary workforce on their own research projects.

In this case I wouldn't be surprised if the core of the idea ('hey, maybe we could use a nano-particle to ...') came from the supervisor but that the 17 year old student actually did do a lot of work (with some sage advice from others) to actually develop that idea into it's current forms.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[phantomfive]

Well, I wasn't doing PhD level work, but when I was a kid I didn't have anyone helping me; it was the library that I learned from, not any of my teachers.

Who introduced you to the library? Who encouraged you in your desire to read?

Re:Did SHE do it?

[angel'o'sphere]

I don'T want to nitpick ... however where I grew up (especially before global warming ;D) we just went on the ice on the lakes and river sidearms in the winter. No need for the parents to bring you to the ice ring.
Where I live now we have public transport and kids use bikes, again no need to bring a kid to the ice ring.
I assume in other countries, like USA, this is because of culture differences not that easy.
Neverthelss there are plenty of kids that just learn what they are interested in and approach their parents to support them. You made it sound as if the parents *always* press their ideas on the kids and drove them into doing "research" or whatever.
Regarding your example Bobby Fischer e.g. I can not find any reference that he was "put into chess" by his mother. But well ... if you say so you certainly are right.

Re:Did SHE do it?

[phantomfive]

Nah, it's not that the parents forced them into it, although in the case of Beethoven or Mozart that may have been true. The more typical example is that the kid will become vaguely interested in something, and then the parents will help them to achieve things. In the example of Bobby Fischer, he became interested on his own, but then his mom started looking around for people he could play against, and at one point even protested in front of the White House for him to be sent as a chess ambassador.

If she hadn't taken interest in his chess life, he most likely would have gotten good enough to beat all his friends and then moved on to something else.

Re:Will we see this in mainstream medicine?

[AHuxley]

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.

We will not live to see it.

[pablo_max]

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.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[pipedwho]

Easy. Do it outside of the USA first.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[wvmarle]

EU also has very strict requirements on allowing medication or treatments onto the market. No clue how much it costs, other than that it's very expensive and requires a lot of testing to be done to see whether it's safe and effective.

Small firms will have to get venture capital on board. That part is actually relatively easy in the US, there is a lot of such capital available. And I'm sure there are plenty of people who are more than willing to invest in promising "cure for cancer" research even if they would be sure that they would not get back their investment.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[antifoidulus]

Any actual evidence of this? Beyond rants of course. Take HIV for instance, big pharma is by not the only one working on the disease, not by a longshot. And yet nobody has found a cure. The big pharma you rant and rave about has also released a vaccine to prevent the most common forms of HPV, despite the fact that at least according to your model of the world they would be better off letting the women get cancer. Big Pharma does a lot of slimy things, but I have yet to find any hard evidence of this particularly popular /. meme being true.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[Sycraft-fu]

There is no truth to it. It is a combination of the general anti-corporate whining some people like to do and the badly misinformed position of more or less thinking anything you don't know how to do must be easy.

In medicine it is a particular problem since not that long ago, there were a lot of advances and simple solutions. Once humanity got an understanding of cellular life and infections and all that, there were massive advanced made pretty easy. Hell you sterilize an operating room and give a patient post-op penicillin and it was amazing how many problems just didn't happen anymore.

Thing is, that time is gone. We've solved the simple medical problems. We are getting on to the much harder ones. As such dealing with them is more difficult.

You have some things like herpes. Not a major health issue, but a tough one to deal with. Normal immunization procedures won't work. Why? Well viral immunization works by introducing something to the body, generally a dead or weakened strain of the virus, that the body can see and learn to fight off safely. That is also why they don't work post-infection. Your body already had the virus and learned how to fight it. Thing is, with herpes you do have it, it stays with you. So the body has it, but can't learn to fight it. Means introducing it would do fuck-all. Have to work something else out.

Or things like cancer or autoimmune diseases where the body -IS- the problem. It is attacking itself. It isn't an outside agent that you could try and find a way to eliminate, the body has turned on itself for some reason. Makes elimination much harder.

But people aren't informed. They think it is just the evil companies that could magically cure all this, if only they weren't so greedy. Not at all the case. We are dealing with hard problems, and they'll only get harder. The more ills that we solve, the harder the remaining ones will be to solve.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[Patch86]

It only takes one of them to break ranks. If you've got 10 "big pharma" companies all selling "treatments", each one will get roughly one tenth of a never ending money train. If you have 9 companies producing "treatments", and one selling a real life miracle cure, you'll have one company selling their product quicker than they can make it, and nine selling bugger all.

Assuming you don't have a cartel in place (which is a big assumption to make), capitalism should in theory force the companies to race each other to the next stage, even if it means their eventual death.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[Goboxer]

While they do make an industry, these companies are in competition with each other. One company, regardless of their feelings towards the other, just wants to make the most money. I can't imagine a pharmaceutical company passing up the opportunity to be the company that cured cancer. Their company name would become instantly household recognizable.I imagine that currently one company does not get all the cancer patient's business, but if they had the freakin' cure that would change. When trying to cure your cancer do you want the original or knockoff?

Besides, a cure is different from a vaccine. And people can get many types of cancer. With a cancer cure it is possible that a person would need treatments several times in their life. As they get older, that number would increase. A cure would probably not be the deathblow to pharmaceutical sales that people say.

But maybe I'm being silly.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[CastrTroy]

Plenty of other places to set up shop. Medical tourism is a big deal. I can guarantee that if you set up shop in Mexico or elsewhere, that cancer patients would flock there. If you had a genuine cure for cancer, most people would pay the price of the plane ticket. That's a paltry sum compared to the cost of medications.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[Rich0]

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.

In the short term the profits are still there.

Why is it that conspiracy theorists all think that no company is capable of thinking beyond the end of the current quarter, except for Pharmaceutical companies which are all unified in this 30-year plan to milk as much money out of health care as possible and they'll resist any 5-year huge surge in profits so that the next 5 CEOs in line after them can have a 10% higher rate of return and they can have mediocre performance?

Companies still research vaccines, which are as close to cures as we can come today. Granted, not many do it, for the reasons you state. However, if somebody came up with the cure for cancer no CEO would say "no, I don't want to make $50B more dollars in the next 5 years and $500M in bonuses because then after I retire the company might go downhill." They're quite content to send the company downhill to squeeze an extra $50M on the bottom line.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[Zaphod The 42nd]

This isn't a cure for cancer, RTFA and move along folks.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[phantomfive]

the badly misinformed position of more or less thinking anything you don't know how to do must be easy.

That is a good observation.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[c6gunner]

I am also reasonably sure they would not make much profit on a cure. After all, you can only cure someone once.

This is why you're not an economist or a CEO, and why you won't find such people amongst the OWS protesters. You hold your ignorance up as a point of pride, while casting wild aspersions and perpetuating conspiracy theories.

Think about some of the rare diseases. Lets say only 100k people in the world have it. If big pharma invented a drug to cure it, but it cost them 500 million to develop and approve it, how could they sell it? It would be 5000 bucks a bill just to break even.

Precisely - which is why medications for some truly rare diseases can run as much as $60,000 for a single course of treatment (a month or so). And guess what - the majority of these medications are ONE SHOT TREATMENTS. There's no "managing" the disease. You give the patient the pills, and you do follow-ups - if they get better, great! - if not, you move on to a different type of treatment.

The idea that drug-companies "manage" disease by creating pills which need to be taken forever is, in a word, completefuckingbullshit. Your paranoia is not a valid substitute for reality.

Re:We will not live to see it.

[Sycraft-fu]

Anyone who's ever had a bad manager has seen this one. They don't understand how tech works, so they think it must be easy. However managers aren't the only one that do it. Plenty of people seem to assume that if they don't understand something it isn't hard to do.

similar idea but differnt method as John kanzius

[magsk]

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)

They are all pretty difficult these days

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Dubai

[witherstaff]

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.

Re:Dubai

[TheRaven64]

The unfortunate down side of this is that you can also pay $100,000 that the insurance won't cover for a lot of snake-oil treatments (some of which are quite harmful) and most people don't have the medical expertise to distinguish between them.

Re:Dubai

[TheRaven64]

That depends on the country. In a lot of places, there is no equivalent of the FDA and doctors can attempt any procedure or prescribe any drugs as long as they have the patient's consent (or without it in some places). There's been a lot of stuff in the news over the last couple of years about people going to such places for miracle cures which have ended up killing them (typically when the original condition was not life threatening).

Re:Dubai

[MenThal]

You can currently receive an Ovarian cancer vaccine treatment in Dubai that is only in a very small first trial in the States.

Is this the HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccine, which is fairly well documented for reducing risk of cervical cancer, or something else?

The HPV is being pushed in Norway by government, and I believe all young women are to be offered it. There is also some push that it should be offered to young men, as the virus is also linked to increased risk of certain other cancer (such as anal), but the whole "gay" vibe of that probably holds it needlessly back.

Re:Dubai

[witherstaff]

No, this is CVac from an Australian company. It takes the patients own immune system and tries to train it to attack ovarian cancer. Prima BioMed Info and Dubai PR about this. It sounds like a promising idea and prelim results look hopeful.

HPV is common in the states now. I know my mother's chemo doctor recommends both boys and girls get it.

Epic failure with that example

[dbIII]

The big pharma you rant and rave about has also released a vaccine to prevent the most common forms of HPV

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.

Re:Epic failure with that example

[Rich0]

Who performed the clinical trials?

Just because a compound was licensed doesn't mean that it is without development cost. In fact, the main reason that companies license out their drugs in the first place is to avoid these development costs (I'm talking about licensing in R&D - not sales partnerships which happen in all industries and generally have different drivers).

Drug companies pay tons of money to license compounds that don't work out and don't make a dime. When they do work out they need to recoup the investment for both the successful and failed drugs. And the costs either way are very large - the phase 2/3 clinical trials are the biggest costs in the whole development process and usually compounds are licensed before they reach this stage (or the licensing costs end up being gargantuan).

I agree that US pricing being higher than the rest of the world is a big problem. I haven't seen anybody propose an effective solution yet. If the US simply stated that they wouldn't pay more than Europe then drug companies would probably just lower the prices 5% in the US and raise them 500% everywhere else. Then some countries would do compulsive licensing and drug prices in the US would still be far higher than elsewhere. Companies won't develop drugs if they can only sell them at marginal cost plus 5%.

The only real solution to the cost disparity problem that I see is to just publicly fund drug development soup to nuts. Right now we fund basic research - sometimes it comes up with candidate molecules and sometimes those candidates even work out (very rarely), but we don't publicly fund drug development (the part where you bribe tens of thousands of doctors to give their patient something that might help them). Actually, a single payer healthcare system would help drive down those costs considerably since you wouldn't need to pay a premium (the government would decide what drugs get top priority and they would be pushed out to the medical community as part of their jobs, and companies wouldn't be trying to out-bid each other to get patients enrolled). The sad thing about the clinical trial system is that patient benefit only happens almost accidentally as everybody else is basically just trying to make as much money as they can and the incentives are only loosely tied to making people better.

I will agree that the whole system needs a major overhaul. The solutions just aren't as easy as some make it out to be (price controls are just a band-aid in my opinion - one that won't really work).

Re:Epic failure with that example

[dbIII]

Who performed the clinical trials?

CSIRO.
They made sure it qualified to the US standards in addition to the Australian ones.

Re:Epic failure with that example

[Rich0]

Citation please? For such a popular drug info online is relatively hard to find, but as best as I can tell Merck performed the Phase III clinical trials on Gardasil. At least, that is what Wikipedia states. If you have references to large-scale trials performed by anybody else I'm certainly interested.

Note that I'm referring to large-scale trials. Lots of companies do Phase I/II trials - they aren't terribly expensive (especially in Phase I - where you just need a dozen healthy guys and you don't need to pay their doctors). Phase III is where the trials cost tens of millions of dollars easily - with thousands of patients spanning a year or two with a very uncertain outcome.

Re:Epic failure with that example

[dbIII]

Hard to find? The guy who developed it won a Nobel Prize for it FFS, you don't get any more mainstream than that.
Over the last few years there has been a lot about it in the Australian media, including complaints from the opposition in Federal Parliment about having to pay for US trials before it could be licenced.

Re:Epic failure with that example

[Rich0]

Excellent - a citation then? Particular around the details of the trials that they did complete beyond the fact that they apparently did some?

Re:Epic failure with that example

[dbIII]

Personally I think it's up to the person who posed it as an example without citation instead of sending me running through years of online news stories and parlimentary proceedings to hunt through just because I remember differently. My original source was radio. I really do not care enough to track down other sources just to make you happy about extra details of development in an offtopic thread, and besides the original development by CSIRO makes the point that it is a bad example. As I wrote above, I'm sure there are plenty of other examples that would have effectively made the point, but I disagree with this one for the reasons I've given.
CSIRO gets so little international recognition that it's annoying when others get the credit for something my taxes have gone into anyway.

Re:Epic failure with that example

[Rich0]

Sure - citation that Merck did the Phase III trials:
The FUTURE II Study Group (May 2007). "Quadrivalent vaccine against human papillomavirus to prevent high-grade cervical lesions". The New England Journal of Medicine 356 (19): 1915–27. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa061741. PMID 17494925. Retrieved 2009-11-11. (From Wikipedia)

The reality is that almost all successful drugs are the result of some level of research and development from any number of organizations. HPV was actually more of a case of this than is typical. When drugs are licensed the financial compensation tends to be based on how far the various partners took the compound on their own. Even if all a company does is Phase III trials and the regulatory applications they are incurring a huge amount of cost, and usually most of the risk as well. After all, if the HPV vaccine was rejected by reguatory agencies then the companies who collected their license payments wouldn't have to return them, and that happens all the time.

In any case, I do support basic reforms like reigning in patent lifetimes (especially for incremental improvements), changing the way costs are bourne by patients, and so on. I'm fine with letting government hold the patents (freely licensing them), and instead just using a fee-for-service model to pay industry. There are a lot of potential ways to improve the system. However, the current system just can't work if there isn't significant opportunity for profit since it involves a lot of up-front risk-taking.

You all have it wrong.

[sempir]

All that happens is the cancer cell is shown the article and told to read the title! Cell suicide ...the new age cure!

Re:Golly!

[Anonymous Coward]

She's from Cupertino, California, USA..

Great job!

[ExtremeSupreme]

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!

Re:Golly!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Golly!

[durrr]

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.

big deal...

[footitch]

I already did this, I just didn't want to brag

Re:Golly!

[e3m4n]

there's an app for that?

Re:Golly!

[sociocapitalist]

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...

Re:similar idea but differnt method as John kanziu

[angel'o'sphere]

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/

very impressive, but ...

[Lluc]

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.

Re:very impressive, but ...

[Zaphod The 42nd]

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.

All the Siemens competition students have a PHD professor as a "mentor", so yeah.

Re:very impressive, but ...

[nasor]

Look at the work of Dr. Jin Xie, who appears to have won an award for EXACTLY this work in 2010. http://nano.cancer.gov/action/programs/pathway.asp

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.

Re:very impressive, but ...

[Lluc]

Look at the work of Dr. Jin Xie, who appears to have won an award for EXACTLY this work in 2010. http://nano.cancer.gov/action/programs/pathway.asp

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.

That's a good example. There are lots of people are in the field now. I referenced Halas because she was publishing on these therapeutic uses of nanoparticles 10 years ago.

Re:very impressive, but ...

[nasor]

Dr. Xie worked at the same Stanford lab as the girl who won this award...

Re:swiss-army knife

[WorBlux]

Compared to current treatments that often only target a handful of cancers, being able to target any cancer is a big deal.

Premature : ScienceDaily == PR

[Mathinker]

> 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).

Awesome!

[snemiro]

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 Controlle...

[FlopEJoe]

"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!

Answer: no, she did not do it

[nasor]

Check out http://nano.cancer.gov/action/programs/pathway.asp :

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.

Re:similar idea but differnt method as John kanziu

[magsk]

so its a drug delivery mechanism then that is different, the article and title are misleading. you ranter ;)

Not to be a downer, but...

[nasor]

Any time you see a news story about an amazing scientific achievement by a child/teenager, there is a nearly 100% chance that the story is not accurately representing either 1) how significant the work actually is, or 2) how much of the work is actually attributable to the child/teen. I'm sure that sounds very cynical, but I've seen it time and again, virtually every time you see a "kid makes amazing science breakthrough in field that regularly stumps PhD researchers!" story. If you dig a little, you invariably find that it's not impressive as the news story makes in sound. Like in this case, were it appears that the whole thing was actually the idea of a Dr. Jin Xie. http://nano.cancer.gov/action/programs/pathway.asp

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.

100k??? Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

She can ALMOST afford four years of college at a top american university now.

Re:100k??? Wow!

[neminem]

Slashdot needs a "+1 (Depressingly accurate)". I suppose there's "insightful", but that doesn't convey quite the same emotion.

Re:Grrr!

[mhajicek]

We all just skip over them eh?

Re:Golly!

[trentfoley]

Are you sure she wasn't just designed in Cupertino, California, USA... but made by Foxconn in China?