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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.
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
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.
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!
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)
I'm not betting on it. The entry contracts for the competition probably contained some intellectual property clause or another.
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.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
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.
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.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
She's from Cupertino, California, USA..
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Are you sure she wasn't just designed in Cupertino, California, USA... but made by Foxconn in China?