Heman Bekele Has Been Conducting His Own Science Experiments Since the age of seven. He has been mixing up whatever he could get his hands on at home and waiting to see if the resulting goo would turn into anything.
To carry out his experiment, he would make use of common household chemicals like dish soap, laundry detergent, and dish soap. Bekele would, oddly, hide them under his bed to see what would happen overnight. There was a great deal of combining as one totally at irregular.
He looked into synthetic responses on the internet and discovered that aluminum and sodium hydroxide can together deliver enormous measures of intensity. That made him consider the possibility that he could help the world.
His parents started paying closer attention to him. As it ended up, having grown-ups watching what he does is something that Heman, presently 15, would need to become acclimated to.
People are now paying a lot of attention to Heman Bekele. In October 2023, the 3M organization and Revelation Training chose Heman, a rising tenth grader at Woodson Secondary School in Fairfax District, Virginia, as the winner of its Young Researcher Challenge. His prize was $25,000.
Heman Bekele gained ground by imagining a cleanser that might one day at some point treat and even forestall various types of skin cancer. In the hope of realizing his goal, he spent a portion of each weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
He will be there less frequently when school is in session. Bekele has a lot of enthusiasm for skin cancer research.
“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”, he said.
Now, his desire — has acquired him acknowledgment as TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2024.
Heman Bekele was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but when he was 4 years old, he and his family moved to the United States. Heman says that some of his earliest memories include seeing laborers working in the scorching sun without wearing any kind of clothing.
His parents told him and his sisters, Halet, now 16, and Liya, now 7, how to cover up and the dangers of spending too much time outside without sunscreen or appropriate clothing.
The young inventor says that he didn’t think much about it when he was younger, but when he moved to America, he realized how bad ultraviolet radiation from the sun can be, especially if you are exposed to it for a long time.
He read a few years ago about imiquimod, a drug that is approved to treat one type of skin cancer and has shown promise against several others, among other uses.
Heman wondered if it could be made more readily available to people in the early stages of the disease because imiquimod, which can assist in the destruction of tumors and typically comes in the form of a cream, is typically prescribed as a front-line drug as part of a broader cancer treatment plan.
He reasoned that a bar of soap might be the ideal vehicle for this life-saving medication. He believes it would be significantly less expensive than the usual $40,000 for skin cancer treatment.
He considered impacting people with this cleanser that nearly everybody paying little mind to financial status, can involve it with water for cleaning and restoring simultaneously. According to Bekele, there was far to go among motivation and application.
Because any therapeutic power that the imiquimod might confer would just be washed away with the suds, carrying out his idea was more difficult than simply mixing the drug into a regular bar of soap.
The solution was to combine the soap with a nanoparticle made of lipids that would remain on the skin even after it was washed away, similar to how moisturizer or fragrance can remain after the suds have been rinsed away.
He participated in the 3M challenge in 2023 with a video that presented his concept. Before long, he got an invite to the organization’s HQ in St. Paul, Minn., to deliver a pitch in front of a board of judges.
He had been selected as the winner of the $25,000 prize before the end of that day. While the funds made it possible for him to continue his research, he would still require a specialized laboratory to do so.
He got that chance in February when he went to a networking event in Washington, D.C. that was put on by the Melanoma Research Alliance. There, he met Vito Rebecca, a molecular biologist who works as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Rebecca Vito was immediately interested in this young boy’s invention after reading about his amazing soap idea. Rebecca was given Bekele’s name and he immediately struck up a conversation with her.
Rebecca Vito disclosed,
“When I found out he lived very nearby in Virginia, I told him if he ever wanted to stop by the lab he’d be more than welcome”
Rebecca agreed to sponsor Heman, serve as his principal investigator, and invite him to work at the Baltimore lab while juggling benchwork and schoolwork in Fairfax. Heman accepted Rebecca’s proposal.
Heman and Rebecca have been conducting fundamental research on mice, injecting the animals with skin cancer strains, and getting ready to apply the soap infused with imiquimod and see what happens.
Even though they are getting ready to test the soap and a control against melanoma, Heman is aware that “there is still a long way to go.” Not only will they need to test the soap, but they will also need to patent it and get FDA certification, both of which can take up to a decade.
At a meeting of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists in June, he gave a talk to 8,000 people at Boston’s Tsongas Center.
He attributes his accomplishments to his family, particularly his parents. Muluemebet, his mother, works as a teacher. His father, Wondwossen, works for the United States Agency for International Development as a human resources specialist.
That sort of experimentation will, Heman trusts, take him to the day that his health-giving soap can at last be used in early-stage cancers—including 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.
Heman is still humble about what he has accomplished in just 15 years, despite everything.
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