Recently three high school students took out top honors in science fairs for their projects involving cancer research:

• Angela Zhang from California developed nanotechnology to destroy cancer stem cells and win the 2011 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology;
• Shree Bose from Texas discovered a protein that could help prevent resistance to chemotherapy to take out first prize in the first International Google Science Fair; and
• Michigan native Nithin Tumma won the 2012 Intel Science Talent Search with his investigation of molecular pathways to compare breast cancer treatments.

The budding researchers walked away with a combined $250,000 in prize money for their efforts!

Angela used nanotechnology in a three-pronged approach to eradicating cancer stem cells, similar to my recent post on using DNA nano-robots to deliver cancer drugs to tumor cells. Not only did Angela design a nanoparticle to find the stem cells, and deliver the drug straight to the cells, but she used gold and iron molecules in the nanoparticle to allow non-invasive imaging via MRI and photoacoustic methods. Any one of these discoveries was worthy of an advanced level science fair project, let alone combining all three. As she told ABC News, “I created a nanoparticle that’s kind of like the Swiss Army knife of cancer treatment in that it can detect cancer cells, eradicate the cancer cells and then monitor the treatment response. So the major aim of the project was to personalize cancer medicine.”

Shree investigated how cancer cells become resistant to chemotherapy. Using ovarian cancer cell cultures, she found that the protein adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) modulated resistance to the drug cisplatin at different times during treatment. If AMPK was combined with cisplatin early in treatment, it reduced the drug’s effectiveness, but if added later during treatment, it helped maintain effectiveness; in effect, reducing resistance. Shree realized the importance of her work, commenting, “That opens up a lot of new avenues for research.”

Nithin’s project looked at the protein cytokine TGF-A involved in cell signaling, one of the key concepts in the Pathways to Cancer. As I wrote in a past post, we can use the analogy of a car to think about cancer cell growth: tumor cell overgrowth is like pressing down on the accelerator; apoptosis is like applying the brakes. Nithin used computational biology techniques (bioinformatics) to research how to inhibit TGF-A to slow cancer cell growth and decrease malignancy.

Science fairs have been running almost as long as we’ve been teaching science, and giving aspiring scientists an opportunity to shine. Alumni of the Intel competition alone have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes, two Fields Medals, three National Medals of Science and 11 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships!

So what’s your next science fair project going to be about?

You can find out more about cancer treatments and cell signalling pathways at www.insidecancer.org.

Researchers have known for a while that not only are glioblastoma multiforme cells highly resistant to chemotherapy, but they can also deftly migrate away from sites of radiation or surgery, setting up camp and regrowing in other parts of the brain. This means that brain cancer is notoriously difficult to treat and the prognosis is almost always grim.

Last year the New York Times described Hanahan and Weinberg’s Hallmarks of Cancer as follows:

“Through a series of random mutations, genes that encourage cellular division are pushed into overdrive, while genes that normally send growth-restraining signals are taken offline. With the accelerator floored and the brake lines cut, the cell and its progeny are free to rapidly multiply. More mutations accumulate, allowing the cancer cells to elude other safeguards and to invade neighboring tissue and metastasize.”

This is a nice analogy, relating overgrowth of cells paired with lack of cell death (apoptosis) as the accelerator and brakes of a car.

However Amy Keating and colleagues at the University of Colorado Cancer Center focused on the car’s GPS system. They published data in Nature: Oncogene showing that when a receptor tyrosine kinase involved in cancer cell growth, Mer, is switched off, significantly less cancer cells migrate to neighboring tissue in cultured laboratory cells. Keating found that not only does Mer interfere with the molecular signaling pathway, but also the cytoskeletal organization (the structure of the cell).

In other words, the Mer switch interferes with the electrics of the GPS system as well as the steering wheel of the car.

This added to their previous finding that Mer could increase some brain cancer cells’ sensitivity to chemotherapy.

So Mer inhibition could be a “double whammy” approach to treating brain cancer: kill as many cancer cells as possible and stop those remaining from migrating.