Juan Diego accelerates budding scientists

Friday, Sep. 05, 2014

by Molly Dumas

Special to the Intermountain Catholic

We think teenagers spend their whole summer lounging by the pool reading and writing nothing but txt msg or acronyms. But that’s not the case with students in Juan Diego’s Academy of Sciences track. This summer, eight students devoted a swath of their summer doing cutting-edge research and presenting papers using words large enough to consume half the alphabet.

Through an internship partnership with the University of Utah College of Pharmacy and Chemistry, the students were paired with researchers studying the effects of pharmaceuticals and chemicals on cancer and other biological functions. Then, one hot August day, the students presented their findings to an audience of researchers, professors, and most importantly, their mentor, Dr. Christine Celestino, chair of Juan Diego’s Academy of Sciences.  

Half of the students had participated in the internship the summer before, and although not one of the eight is old enough to vote, they probably know more about cancer than most of their peers put together. 

During his internship last year, Connor Helgeson studied how certain drugs bind to mitochondria to kill triple negative breast cancer cells – a type often found in males – that do not respond well to treatment. Later in the year, at the Salt Lake Valley Science and Engineering Fair, Helgeson won first place in the Medicine and Health Sciences Division, the Surgeon General’s Special Science Award, and the In Vitro Science Award. His research project this year studied the versatility of a coiled-coil peptide in different forms of cancer. 

Meanwhile, Gabe Freeman studied truncating and capping a coiled coil peptide for treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia. His previous internship focused on delivering chemotherapy drugs using tiny gold “nanocages” to tumors like prostate cancer.  

Michael Enda, who last year studied a drug that inhibits cancer cells without being toxic to good cells, conducted his research on developing a way to transport cancer medications so that they target tumors rather than healthy tissue in the body.  

“The students were amazing and their presentations were certainly over my head,” said Ronny Cutshall, president of The ALSAM Foundation, which sponsors Juan Diego’s Academy of Science summer internship program. Cutshall attended their presentations in the U. of U. Health Sciences Education Building, and noted that AJ Toledo, David Fenton and Rex Alley barely have their drivers licenses.

Nevertheless, these students’ knowledge about what drives the body far exceeds the miles they have put behind the wheel. Toledo’s research also dealt with cancer and prenyltransferase inhibitors and their role in the metabolic pathways used by photosynthetic bacteria, while Fenton’s bioactivity study isolated antimicrobial compounds from bacteria and Alley did a “Computational Study of Ligand influence in N-Heterocyclic Carbene Chemistry.” 

Not to be outdone, seniors Megha Kundra researched using gene recombinant technology to express protein and Kevin Furukawa had the only engineering project in the group, designing a mass spectrometer to identify nanoparticles.

Pope John Paul II once proclaimed, “The future begins today, not tomorrow.” Perhaps the future eradication of cancer will come sooner than later, with the hope placed in the hand of these very bright and inquisitive young people.