http://online.wsj.com/article/AP27e6b4fd88bf44e49660ba127407d5f4.html My question is, how did she do this? She must have had access to a lab? What does “design” mean, exactly? I’m curious what she actually did here.
There was a science competition when I was in high school, but it didn’t come with such a big prize and most of the experiments involved things you could research and do at home.
I once made a solar system with Styrofoam balls.
The Siemens Foundation website lists her mentor as a biologist at Stanford. Dr. Cheng runs a lab with the objective of developing “novel molecular imaging probes and techniques for non-invasive detection of cancer and its metastasis at the earliest stage, so that cancer can be cured or transformed into a chronic, manageable disease.”
I poked around Angela’s high school’s website - it looks like a generally high acheiving school I don’t know the specifics of that school, but I know that the math and science magnet school near me requires an internship in a research lab at some point. Perhaps her school has a similar program.
There are a few more details in this article from the San Jose Mercury News. It sounds like she did some work at Stanford University. I’ve read articles on previous winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (which predated this one from Siemens) and many of the kids did work at government labs, universities and other places.
I don’t know that much about the Siemens competition (I understand it to be a break-off from the original Westinghouse competition) but my high school is consistently in the top 3 for Intel finalists and winners. From observing the process of friends and aquaintences, though, an Intel project takes about 2 years to complete, and is usually done at a top flight research facility. At my high school at least, only rarely is the student helped by personal contacts (family, etc.,) as a large proportion of students are the children of immigrants. Often there is either a school alumni contact or a past competitor who wants to give back to the program. Though many people do projects in areas in which the high school excels, sometimes they are just guided by their own interests. A friend of mine was a semifinalist for a primate behavior project, and my school offered no relevant coursework in that. He did his observations at the Bronx Zoo.
The prize for Intel is also $100,000.
She goes to Monta Vista High in Cupertino. It’s a very high achievement school with a very high percentage of Asian students (72%). The Cupertino school district is well known in places like Taiwan and China as one of THE places to live to get your kids a top rate education.
She’s also a winner, 2-years in a row, of the Intel Science Award. Or, rather, one aspect of it.
I have to wonder, though, how much of this work is really original and how much is under the guidance of her adviser. That’s certainly true of most 1st/2nd year graduate students.
I don’t know about this project in particular, but drug and drug delivery design is a huge field of research both at the university and Big Pharma level (with the latter often funding the former, of course).
It’s a rather complex topic, and there’s no single way to design a drug or really predict if it will work (beyond comparisons to other known molecules) without engaging in some sort of clinical trials.
As a really generic, simplified example, let’s say that someone discovers that cancer cells for a particular cancer have a protein that has a particular structure and that it isn’t found on/in normal, healthy cells. This gives you a target - something you can use to identify cancer cells.
To design a drug, then, you can design a molecule that will bind to that protein; if in “normal” cancer cells/the body it normally binds something that looks like an F (to use letters as an example) then perhaps you can do some chemistry and create something that looks like an E or a P…similar enough that it will “fit” inside the protein, but different enough that the protein can’t do what it normally does. You jam up or break or otherwise disrupt that protein, and - hopefully - you kill the cell.
Ta-da! You’ve designed and developed a cancer-killing drug.
The trick is whether it also screws up some unrelated proteins or processes in healthy cells, causes side effects or kills the patient, etc etc.
It sounds easy, but it really isn’t, largely because the body/cell just isn’t a simple thing. As much as we know, there’s so much more we don’t know at all.
I did (one of) my undergraduate research projects on trying to design polycycliccompounds with a particular reaction site at a particular location, in the hopes of creating structures that resemble some known drugs/chemicals but with differences that might lead to better drugs (the structure I was working with was a precursor to all kinds of things).