Kids Saving The World - Cure For Cancer Edition

Dec 9th, 2011

Meet 17-year old Angela Zhang. She is not your average adolescent. Hailing from Cupertino, Ca., she has just won a $100,000 prize in the 2011 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. What earned this young woman such an honor? Well... she has, potentially, taken a groundbreaking step towards a cure for cancer. I kid you not.

Matt wilson reports for the San Jose Mercury News:

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"In her project, Zhang aimed to design a targeted gold and iron oxide-based nanoparticle with the potential to eradicate cancer stem cells through a controlled delivery of the drug salinomycin to the site of the tumor. The multifunctional nanoparticle combines therapy and imaging into a single platform, with the gold and iron-oxide components allowing for both MRI and photoacoustic imaging."

After expressing regret for a somewhat less productive youth similar to my own, Eric Limer writes:

"The nanoparticle Zhang created is already being referred to as something of a “swiss army knife” in the area of cancer treatment. That’s not to say it’s dull and rusty because I you didn’t take care of it when I was you were out camping, but rather that it has a whole bunch of useful applications...

"Not only is this impressive in its own right, but let me remind you this girl is 17. She’s got a lot of time ahead of her. She spent about 1,000 hours developing this particle since 2009 (when she must have been 15) and she wants to continue to study chemical engineering, biomedial engineering, or physics. She hopes to someday be a research professor. Thank god, because if she said she wanted to be a poet, we might have a problem on our hands."