Southwestern Ontario, Melanie Grondin, 17, Shawn Liu, 18, Vincent Massey Secondary School, Windsor
More than 25,000 bone marrow transplants are done annually to treat leukaemia and other life-threatening diseases. One of the biggest obstacles to success is getting enough of a matching donor’s healthy blood-forming cells from living bone marrow. Since donors often cannot donate enough such cells, the ideal solution is to grow them as stem cells outside the body. The risks involved in that today, however, prohibit the procedure from current practice.
Now two Grade 12 students have found a marker that reveals when good stem cells have gone or are about to go bad. This discovery earned Melanie Grondin, 17 and Shawn Liu, 18, students at Windsor’s Vincent Massey Secondary School, top prize in the 2013 South Western Ontario “Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada” (SBCC).
After many trials conducted four days a week after school at Dr. Lisa Porter’s lab at the University of Windsor, Melanie Grondin and Shawn Liu tested a protein marker that reveals dividing stem cells that lack an off-switch and keep reproducing running the risk of becoming cancerous.
This marker might one day be used as a screening tool, allowing bone marrow stem cells grown outside the body to be safely transplanted, says Dr. Porter. “Finding safe ways to do this is huge. It could open up new opportunities for bone marrow transplants.”
“I enjoyed the suspense of pursuing an answer, and the thrill of analyzing the fruits of our efforts,” says Shawn, whose post-secondary ambition is biomedical engineering.
Mel says she enjoyed Dr. Porter’s lab so much she definitely wants to go into research — music to the ears of Dr. Porter.
“They did a fantastic job. These are the kinds of students we need for the future of Canadian science.”
All offered special thanks to research associate Kaityn Matthews for her mentoring and to the Kaitlyn Bedard Bone Marrow Association for funding the study.
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