An American teenager is making waves in the oncological research world, having invented a soap which he hopes will, in the future, be used to treat and even prevent multiple forms of skin cancer.
He has also been named the TIME Teen of the Year.
Last October, the 3M company and Discovery Education selected Heman Bekele, a 10th-grade high-school pupil in Virginia, USA, as the winner of its Young Scientist Challenge. His prize: $25 000. His accomplishment: inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent skin cancer.
It may take years before such a product comes to market, but this summer Heman (15) is already spending part of every weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to bring his dream to fruition.
Heman whipped up the most dangerous of what he called his “potions” when he was just seven-years-old, having been conducting his own science experiments for about three years by that point, mixing up whatever he could get his hands on at home and waiting to see if the resulting goo would turn into anything.
“They were just dish soap, laundry detergent and common household chemicals,” he said of the ingredients he’d use. “I would hide them under my bed and see what would happen if I left them overnight,” he told TIME Magazine.
For Christmas before his 7th birthday, Heman was given a chemistry set that came with a sample of sodium hydroxide. By then, he had been looking up chemical reactions online and learned that combining aluminium and sodium hydroxide can produce prodigious amounts of heat.
“I thought that this could be a solution to energy, to making an unlimited supply,” he said. “But I almost started a fire.”
After that, his parents kept a closer eye on him. As it turned out, having adults watching what he does is something that Heman would have to get used to. These days, loads of people are paying him a whole lot of attention.
“I’m really passionate about skin-cancer research,” he said “whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field. It’s absolutely incredible to think that one day my bar of soap will be able to make a direct impact on somebody else’s life. That’s the reason I started this all in the first place.”
That’s what has earned Heman recognition as TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2024.
Born in Addis Ababa before emigrating to the US with his family when he was four, Heman recalls that some of his earliest memories were of seeing labourers working in the blistering sun, usually with no protection for their skin. His parents taught him and his sisters to cover up, and explained the dangers of too much time outdoors without sunscreen or proper clothing.
“When I was younger, I didn’t think much of it, but when I came to America, I realised what a big problem the sun and ultraviolet radiation is when you’re exposed to it for a long time,” he said.
It didn’t take too long for him to start thinking about how he might help. A few years ago, he read about imiquimod, a drug that, among other uses, is approved to fight one form of skin cancer and has shown promise against several more.
Typically, imiquimod, which can help destroy tumours and usually comes in the form of a cream, is prescribed as a frontline drug as part of a broader cancer treatment plan, but Heman wondered if it could be made available more easily to people in the earliest stages of the disease.
A bar of soap, he reckoned, might be just the delivery system for such a lifesaving drug, not just because it was simple, but because it would be more affordable than the $40 000 it typically costs for skin-cancer treatment.
“What is one thing that is an internationally impactful idea, something that everyone can use, (regardless of) socio-economic class?” Heman recalled thinking. “Almost everyone uses soap and water for cleaning. So soap would probably be the best option.”
But executing his idea was more complicated than simply mixing the drug into an ordinary bar of soap, since any therapeutic power the imiquimod might confer would just be washed down the drain with the suds.
The answer was to combine the soap with a lipid-based nanoparticle that would linger on the skin when the soap was washed away, much as moisturiser or fragrance can stay behind after the suds are rinsed off.
There was only so much brainstorming Heman could do on his own, however. Then, in 2023, he came across the 3M challenge and submitted a video explaining his idea.
He received an invite to the company’s HQ to deliver a pitch before a panel of judges. Before that day was out, he’d been named the winner.
The $25 000 prize, he knew, would go a long way toward helping him afford to pursue his research, but he’d still need a professional lab in which to conduct the work. That opportunity arrived in February, when he attended a networking event hosted by the Melanoma Research Alliance, in Washington, where he met Vito Rebecca, a molecular biologist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins.
“I remember reading somewhere something about this kid who had an idea for a skin-cancer soap,” said Rebecca. “It immediately piqued my interest, because I thought, how cool, him wanting to make it accessible to the whole world. And then, by complete serendipity at this Melanoma Research Alliance meeting, the CEO of the alliance introduced me to Heman. His passion was evident. When I found out he lived nearby in Virginia, I told him if he ever wanted to stop by the lab he’d be welcome.”
Heman took him up on that idea, and Rebecca agreed to sponsor Heman, acting as his principal investigator and inviting him to work at the Baltimore lab, toggling between benchwork and schoolwork back in Fairfax.
For nearly six months now, Heman and Rebecca have been running basic research on mice, injecting them with strains of skin cancer and preparing to apply the lipid-bound, imiquimod-infused soap and see what the results are.
And though they’re getting ready to test it and a control against melanoma, Heman knows “there’s still a long way to go” – not just testing the soap, but also patenting it and getting FDA certification, which can take a decade altogether.
It is a measure of Heman’s enormous head start that when that decade passes, he will still be only 25, the age at which medical students have not even completed their postgrad education.
He’s making good use of that time. In addition to working on his idea, he’s promoting it. In June, he delivered a presentation before 8 000 people at Boston’s Tsongas Centre, during a meeting of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists. “That was nerve-racking,” he said, “but fun.”
He credits his family, particularly his parents, for setting the stage for his achievements. His mother Muluemebet is a teacher; his father Wondwossen is a human-resources specialist for the US Agency for International Development. The example of their sacrifice, coming to an unfamiliar country in service of their children’s education, has imbued him with a love of learning and a commitment to pursuing the improbable, or even the seemingly impossible.
Heman hopes that this will lead to his health-giving soap eventually being used in early-stage cancers, including so-called cancer stage 0, when there is just a small growth that has not yet had much effect on the surface of the skin, and then in later stages, when it would be an adjunct to other treatments.
Hr remains humble about what he’s accomplished in just 15 years.
“Anybody could do what I did,” he said. “I just came up with an idea. I worked towards that idea, and I was able to bring it to life.”
But he confesses that he worries too: scientific breakthroughs seem to be coming faster and faster – in medicine, in engineering, in artificial intelligence – and he frets that people may have reached something of a saturation point.
“A lot of people have this mindset that everything’s been done, there’s nothing left for me to do,” he said, “I’d say we’ll never run out of ideas in this world. Just keep inventing, keep thinking of new ways to improve our world and keep making it a better place.”
Time Magazine article – Heman Bekele Is TIME’s 2024 Kid of the Year (Open access)
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