Ada Lovelace Day 2012: Angela Zhang, Brittany Wenger, and Shree Bose - Teen Girls Fighting Cancer
Some of you who read this blog may know that a close relative of mine has been dealing with an aggressive cancer for the last year or so. When I say I admire the young women in this post, I don’t just mean because they’re intelligent, dedicated and accomplished. I also admire them for choosing to spend their time researching cancer, which is the leading cause of death in the developed world, and the second leading cause of death worldwide. Few people end up helping others as significantly as these young women have already managed - while still in high school.
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Angela Zhang developed a nanoparticle for administering chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells. Chemo drugs work by inhibiting the growth of cancer cells, but at the cost of healthy growing cells. (That’s why chemotherapy patients frequently lose their hair - hair grows faster than many other tissues in the body, so it is among the first to be impacted by these toxic drugs.) It’s hoped that nanoparticle technologies would enable doctors to target the cancer cells, leaving healthy cells free to grow and function as normal. Zhang’s research has two special properties. First, her work targets cancer stem cells, which are capable of turning into many types of cancer cells and are therefore thought to be drivers of metastatic disease. (Most - though not all - cancers are not deadly until they reach the metastatic stage.) Secondly, her nanoparticle uses gold and iron-oxide particle components, which allows for imaging of treatment delivery.
Brittany Wenger’s research attacks cancer mortality from a different angle. Early detection of breast cancer can be life-saving, if tumors can be removed before spreading to the rest of the body. Unfortunately, detection is not a foolproof process. Common forms of screening such as breast exam or mammography can only tell us that there’s a tumor, not whether it is malignant. In order to determine malignancy, a biopsy is usually done, and depending on the size and location of the tumor this can be quite invasive. This presents a dilemma for doctors: should they strive to minimize the number of false negatives (people who believe they don’t have tumors) by doing their most invasive, most accurate test? Or should they minimize the stress for false positives - people undergoing invasive procedures when they don’t have to?
This is where Wenger’s work comes in. What if you had a screening technique that minimized both false negatives and false positives - and, furthermore, was minimally invasive? Wenger used neural network modeling to diagnose samples gained from Fine Needle Aspiration, one of the safest, least invasive procedures. Her model used nine diagnostic factors as inputs and was tested on 681 samples. Out of this sample set, only 15 were classified as false positives, while only 2 were classified as false negatives. This means that out of 237 samples diagnosed as malignant, only 15 were incorrect - only 15 people having to unnecessarily undergo further, more invasive procedures. And out of 419 samples diagnosed as benign, only 2 people were incorrectly given a clean bill of health. These accuracy rates are as good as - arguably better - than the commercial diagnostic tools currently out there.
Shree Bose investigated AMP-kinase (AMPK), a metabolic enzyme found in both healthy and cancerous cells. In healthy cells, AMPK is activated only when the cells are highly active, but in cancer cells AMPK is activated at low energy levels as well, giving cancerous cells an energy advantage. Bose and her mentors hypothesized that this advantage might explain problems with Cisplatin, a drug commonly used to treat ovarian cancer, to which cancers often developed resistance. If Cisplatin was damaging both cancerous and healthy cells, but only cancerous cells could draw on AMPK, what would happen if AMPK was inhibited? Bose found that adding an AMPK-inhibitor decreased Cisplatin resistance, improving the effectiveness of the treatment. (You can see Bose speak, along with Lauren Hodge, 14 year old cancer researcher, at TEDxWomen.)
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As impressive as Zhang, Wenger and Bose certainly are, one can’t help wondering about the circumstances which allowed them to achieve all that they did. Each of these young women worked either in coordination with or under the supervision of a university lab. How did they get those opportunities? And how can we make these resources more widely available?
The performance of scientific research is not a highly specialized and difficult skill, such that only a handful of the most precocious teenagers could manage it. While ability of course varies, most people of any age can formulate hypothesis, design experiments, collect data, and ponder the results - and many have the desire to. Scientific research should not be restricted to universities and established labs requiring thousands or millions of dollars in funding. Science should not be just a profession, but a hobby as well.
This is no more clear than when it comes to cancer research. As I mentioned before, cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. Prominent cancer researcher Robert Weinberg puts it this way: “If we lived long enough, sooner or later we all would get cancer.” If so many of us will one day have cancer, don’t we have a right to get involved in the research that will help us fight it?
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This entry was posted in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, an event celebrating women in Science, Technnology, Engineering and Math. You can find my previous Ada Lovelace Day posts here and here.