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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 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
you're right, but I did find the siemens announcement here http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/competition/2011_winners.htm#2
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)
Easy. Do it outside of the USA first.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.