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In the fight against cancer, a 17-year-old makes her markApr 01, 2009 (Philadelphia Daily News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- TIFFANY LIU, confident beyond her 17 years, breezed through the austere halls and research labs of the Reimann Building at the Fox Chase Cancer Center as if she could walk them blindfolded. Shy and soft-spoken, she led the way to a room where she has spent many a long night working after school with a mass spectrometer, a $600,000 machine that measures and identifies proteins in a patient's fluid sample. Here, in the nationally recognized research lab in the Fox Chase section of Northeast Philadelphia, Liu has already made her mark. The lab has "become a second home" to the George Washington High School senior for nearly two years, according to her supervisor, Anthony Yeung. Last month, Tiffany's research was published in an article she co-wrote in the medical journal Pancreas, titled "Proteomic Analyses of Pancreatic Cyst Fluids." In plain English, the research could make it possible for the first time to find proteins in a tiny drop of fluid before a cyst grows larger, Yeung said. And that, he said, could help prevent cancer. "We don't want to be diagnostic, we want to be predictive," said Yeung, a Fox Chase research scientist. "We want to prevent cancer." Yeung said that Tiffany took turns with another scientist and himself to keep the spectrometer running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight months last year. In addition to recording and analyzing data, Tiffany was responsible for helping to keep the spectrometer replenished with chemicals to work properly. "She was so meticulous," Yeung said of Tiffany. "Had she made one mistake, the whole project would have failed." Tiffany's research won Best of Fair at the Philadelphia School District's George Washington Carver Science Fair, at Temple University in March 2008. And today she will present her research in competition at the Delaware Valley Science Fairs, at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center, in Oaks, Montgomery County. If she wins, she could go on to international competition. She didn't want to brag Tiffany simply smiled. She said she had no idea that her work as a high-school intern would lead to being part of a team that earned a patent. She hadn't even told Debbie Liberman, her biology teacher at George Washington, that she was being published. Liberman said that she learned of it from an official of the Fox Chase internship program. "I didn't want to sound like I was bragging about it," Tiffany explained. Tiffany said that her curiosity about science, especially pharmacy, began early. She was 5 years old and sick one day when her parents gave her some medicine. "The medicine made me throw up," she said. "I hated the taste so much." For the next two years, the only way her father could get her to take medicine was for him to take some, too. "I began to think, 'How could something that tastes so nasty also be beneficial for your health?' " she recalled. Before the internship, Tiffany said, she had been thinking of becoming a pharmacist. Now, she said, "I'm still trying to decide between pharmacy and medicine." She has applied to several universities, but her first choice is the University of Pennsylvania. A 'risky' project The research project began about three years ago. Dr. Jeffrey Tokar, a physician at the cancer center, asked Yeung to help find early "biomarkers" in cyst fluid that might suggest a person's risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Tiffany started as an intern at the cancer lab the summer before her junior year. Eileen Ke, a co-author of the journal article, began working on the project while a student at Germantown Academy in Fort Washington; she's now at Washington University in St. Louis. One reason Yeung is pleased to hire bright and motivated high school students as interns, he said, is that "they have no fear." "What we do is so unconventional that even some of our own researchers and post-docs don't want to do them," Yeung said. "They have said they won't touch a project because it is too risky, and as a post-doc or a Ph.D. student they want to deliver their research on time and get out and get a job." Yeung said that Tiffany and other interns are "very enthusiastic and very bright. And they don't know any better. They don't care. They just want the fun." He said that he was ecstatic about the findings. Tokar, who specializes in interventional endoscopy, was more cautious, saying said that the research is "very preliminary." "I think it's very promising and very intriguing," Tokar said. "It's optimistic, and an exciting addition to what we know about pancreatic cysts." Tokar, Yeung and Tiffany agreed that the experiment, based on the use of fluid samples from 20 patients, should be expanded to larger numbers of patients. A teacher's recommendation Liberman, Tiffany's advanced-placement biology teacher at George Washington, on Bustleton Avenue near Gorman Street in Northeast Philadelphia, said that she noticed Tiffany's abilities when she was in her ninth-grade honors biology class. Liberman, who had recommended that Tiffany apply for the Fox Chase internship, said that the cancer center was "impressed with her work ethic and discipline." While waiting for lab results, Tiffany would go to the cancer center's library to do her school homework, Liberman said. Now that Tiffany is in her second year as a Fox Chase intern, she has a new research project: "I want to try to help create a drug that would cure parasitic diseases like malaria," she said. -- To read an abstract of the article co-written by Tiffany Liu about her research, go to: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19136908 To see more of the Philadelphia Daily News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.philly.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Philadelphia Daily News Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |