By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 15:47 EDT
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A Canadian high school student has improved an ineffective experimental cancer therapy with a simple tweak ? pairing it with antibiotics ? earning accolades from a panel of eminent scientists on Tuesday.
Cancer ?photothermal therapy? ? or PTT ? involves injecting a patient with gold nanoparticles. These then accumulate in tumors and, when heated using light, attack the cancer cells.
The idea has shown promise but is not very effective because the cancer cells fight back, producing heat-shock proteins to protect themselves.
However, India-born high school student Arjun Nair, 16, showed how an antibiotic (17-AAG) may overcome the defenses cancer cell deploy and make the treatment more effective.
The discovery earned Nair the top prize in the 20th Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada, after he spent two years working on his idea at the University of Calgary?s Nanoscience Labs in Alberta.
?Proof-of-concepts were developed and tested in order to demonstrate the viability of PTT,? says Nair. ?Moreover, after analyzing the literature a mathematical model was developed to evaluate a theoretical synergetic treatment.?
A total of 208 high school students collaborating on 123 projects, all mentored in professional labs over several months, took part in the annual competition.
In addition to a Can$5,000 (US$4,919) award for his discovery, Nair also won a Can$1,000 (US$984) prize for the project with the greatest commercial potential.
Prizes were also awarded for research into how genetic mutations naturally help some HIV patients escape symptoms, how to tailor stem cell treatments for Parkinson?s disease, a potential new therapy to reduce the severity of diabetes, and a possible novel tactic to fight the world?s deadliest brain cancer.
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“Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password,” explains a UC Berkeley School of Information press release about new research that utilizes brainwaves to authenticate users instead of passwords of numbers and letters. With a $100 consumer-friendly brainwave-reading headset, the Neurosky MindSet, Professor John Chuang found that the mere task of concentrating on one’s breath was enough to uniquely identify them. Brainwave devices, or Electroencephalograms (EEG), measure electrical activity along the scalp, in the form of wavelengths known to be associated with certain moods, mental states and behaviors. For decades, cognitive scientists have used EEG devices as therapy for a range of mental-health issues, from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) to post-traumatic stress disorder. As technological advances shrunk the size and cost of EEG devices, a small cottage industry of consumer products, like the Neurosky, have brought the possibility of therapy and mind-controlled computers into the home. The image above is our own Anthony Ha?wearing?Neurosky-enhanced cat ears that rotate when the user is paying attention. The next phase of “passthought” research will reportedly focus on finding thoughts that are user-friendly. In one test, Chuang asked participants to imagine performing an action of their favorite sport, but “they found it unnatural to imagine the movement of their muscles without actually moving them.” Before security hawks cheer the arrival of theft-proof passwords, researchers have been able to?“hack” people’s minds. Another team at Berkeley found that they could extract data, such as ATM PINs, by identifying when users were thinking of familiar information. So if passthoughts ever become mainstream, it might not be wise to have your signature thought be something incriminating … just think about handing off candy to a baby.