Manitoba, Daniel Huang, 16, Grade 11, St. John’s Ravenscourt School in Winnipeg
With treatment, the average survival of patients diagnosed with the Glioblastoma (GBM) form of brain cancer is just 15 months. Without treatment, it is 4.5 months.
Daniel Huang, a Grade 11 student at St. John’s Ravenscourt School in Winnipeg, investigated today’s treatments to win the $1,500 top prize in the 2013 Manitoba “Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada” (SBCC).
According to Daniel, cancer cells die in one of two ways:
* Autophagy, in which the cell eats itself — self-cannibalization activated by its starvation, for example; and
* Apoptosis — death caused by chemotherapy drugs that activate protein signaling pathways within the cancer cell. Mutation in these proteins, however, can prevent cell death.
Under the mentorship of Dr. Spencer B. Gibson, Director of the Manitoba Institute of Cell Biology (MICB), and Lin Li and Elizabeth Henson, who are research associates at MICB, Daniel wondered whether a drug that induces autophagy would enhance the effect of chemotherapy.
He treated GBM cancer cells with a drug called 2-methoxyestradiol, which has been shown to induce both types of cell death in other cancers.
To Daniel’s surprise, the results of his research were the complete opposite of what he expected.
He found the drug did induce both types of cancer cell death but this decreased the efficacy of the chemotherapy drugs.
“Instead of increasing the amount of cell death, autophagy helped the cell resist chemotherapy treatment. So, instead of inducing autophagy, perhaps inhibiting it will increase the efficacy of chemotherapy,” explains Daniel.
He says that understanding his finding was the most challenging part of this project.
“While learning all the procedures was very hard, the data I got with this research was even harder to interpret. For a couple months after finishing the actual research, I was trying to fit the results into my hypothesis. In the end, after reading various papers, I concluded that autophagy was helping the cells survive. Getting to this simple conclusion was very hard, especially after several months being convinced that it was the opposite.”
Now Daniel is more decided than ever to continue researching.
He plans to continue work with his mentors and use different drugs to continue his research over the course of next year.
“Since these results were not as expected, I’ll be validating these results by testing other drugs and cancers,” says Daniel who adds that his goal is to study medicine “with research involvement.”
Daniel, a passionate debater and fan of the Spain’s professional soccer league, “La Liga”, has a word of advice for other students:
“Scientific research plays a role in everything we do,” he says. “Everyone can be encouraged to be involved in science … and if you have an interest in biotech, then ask around about the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada. It’s surprising who is connected with the SBCC. And you will eventually find someone that can get you started.”
{ 0 comments… add one now }
{ 2 trackbacks }