Transcriber: Matt Chan Reviewer: Denise RQ
When I was six, I ate a bag of packing peanuts,
just to see if they would taste like peanuts.
(Laughter)
They didn't.
(Laughter)
I've always been extremely curious.
My life has revolved around asking questions,
questions that have oftentimes driven me to do things of dubious advisability
(Laughter)
like eating packing peanuts.
Another one of these incidences occurred four years ago,
during my freshman year of high school.
There was a week that was unusually stressful,
and I wasn't getting very much sleep.
I started to developing a skin rash on my hands and my elbows.
My dermatologist explained that it was most likely due to my lack of sleep,
but at the time, I didn't quite understand how sleep could affect my skin.
So, being a curious self, I decided to run an experiment,
in my closet, with two mice.
(Laughter)
Little did I know that I managed to buy one male and one female mouse
(Laughter)
put them in the same cage,
and before I knew it, I had a lot more than just two mice.
(Laughter)
I would later discover that my skin rash is actually a type of allergic reaction,
known as erythema multiforme
which can be caused by the same bacteria that causes pneumonia.
Basically, all of those evenings with very little sleep has stressed
my body to the point
where I was extremely vulnerable to bacterial infection.
So now I understood what my dermatologist was talking about,
how sleep could affect skin.
But my curiosity didn't end there, I still had so many questions.
Why do we need sleep? How do we get rid of allergies?
And the one that was most intriguing to me:
what other factors affect skin development?
I wanted to explore that question further,
but rather than run
another potentially catastrophic experiment to my closet
I decided to look for a real position at a real research institute.
So, after emailing countless professors at University of Colorado at Boulder,
I eventually found myself performing graduate-level developmental research,
as a freshman in high school.
(Applause)
The lab I was working in was focused on a particular aspect of skin development
specifically, the development of skin cancers.
Skin cancer is a huge problem, especially here in Colorado.
It's the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States.
In fact,
about one out of every five Americans will develop some former skin cancer
in their life time.
Here in Colorado where we have over 300 days of sunshine,
skin cancer affects nearly twice as many people compared to the national average.
There are three major types of skin cancer: basal cell carcinoma,
squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma.
The first two, basal cell and squamous cell carcinoma are the most common,
with about 1 million new cases annually in the United States.
Even though they are rarely invasive,
they still contribute to about a quarter of all skin cancer related deaths.
The third type, melanoma is considerably more malignant.
In fact one American dies of melanoma almost every hour.
Currently, we have
many available treatments for these skin cancers,
except none of them are very efficient.
That's because they not only affect tumors,
they are also damaging perfectly healthy tissue,
and that's where my work comes in.
I want to find a way that specifically target skin cancers,
without damaging any of surrounding cells.
But cancer work is rarely that simple or easy
because cells are, quite frankly, very, very complicated.
If one of you cells was a city,
then this is what the subway map might look like.
A city has more than just a subway,
there are buildings, roads, airports, buses.
This process here is only a portion of what the cell does,
but it's extremely important, nonetheless.
This particular map illustrates cellular metabolism,
the collection of all of chemical processes that occur in a cell
in order to maintain life.
Each of the subway stations represents a chemical,
and lines that connect them represent proteins.
I wanted to find a single protein out of all of these
that is only expressed in skin cancers and not in healthy skin cells.
As you can see, that task was particularly daunting,
but eventually,
through a very extensive process of trial and error,
I came across a potential protein candidate,
a protein known as
Malonyl CoA (Coenzyme A)-acyl carrier protein transacylase,
or MCAT for short.
MCAT plays a very specific role in the cell,
to convert one chemical into another
except of functions in a larger pathway
that is responsible for the cell's production of energy.
Without MCAT, this entire pathway falls apart,
and the cell is no longer capable of generating large sums of energy.
I wanted to see
what would physically happen to these cells,
if I were to remove this MCAT.
I predicted that healthy skin cells, because they don't use very much energy,
should be able to function normally without MCAT.
On the other hand, skin cancer cells,
because they grow so rapidly, and consume so much energy,
should rely heavily on my MCAT activity.
To test this, I had to first reduce the amount of MCAT in these cells.
Normally, a ribosome translates a messenger RNA
in order to produce the mature MCAT protein.
However, we can interfere with this process
by binding a short strand of RNA to the messenger RNA.
This then, physically blocks the ribosome
preventing it from producing the MCAT protein.
The results of this procedure are absolutely phenomenal.
Here we see the growth of a healthy skin cell
over the span of about two weeks.
Underneath it, we see the growth of a skin cell with MCAT inhibited.
As you can see, there is virtually no difference between these two samples.
Now let's look at the results for the cancer cells.
These are squamous cell carcinomas,
and again, we see a relatively consistent rate of growth.
However, when I remove MCAT from these cancer cells,
we see almost no growth at all.
(Applause)
Essentially, I found a protein that when inhibited
can prevent skin cancer growth without affecting skin tissue growth,
and the implications of this are huge.
In the future, we will be able to develop a lotion
that can deliver a drug to inhibit MCAT.
People can apply this lotion to a region with a potential skin tumor.
As a result, they are preventing the onset of skin cancer,
without affecting any of the surrounding tissue.
A treatment like this is not only much more effective than current therapies,
it's also more accessible, less invasive, and much cheaper.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Usually, when I explain my research to people, they respond by saying,
"Oh, so you cure cancer!"
and while this notion of curing cancer sounds very grand,
the general idea is actually greatly misunderstood.
In reality, the word cancer itself is quite misleading because it encompasses
so many different types and so many different causes.
But take a look again at our cell subway map.
In a healthy cell,
every single one of these components works together as a system,
all of the trains run smoothly.
But when even a single train runs off its track,
the entire system loses control.
That's how it is with cancer cells.
They are simply too complex for us to find a generic cure.
So no, I did not cure cancer.
In fact, nobody is ever going to cure cancer.
But all of our discoveries and all of our achievements are small steps
towards a world without cancer.
Likewise, it takes the same small steps to uncover
the countless other mysteries in life.
And so today, I encourage all of you to take those small steps,
to ask questions, to experiment, to do things of dubious advisability
(Laughter)
because ultimately, it's those explorations
that help us better understand the complexities around us.
Thank you.
(Applause)