14-year-old invents soap for cancer treatment, wins US Young Scientist award
A middle school teen, Heman Bekele, has been named “America’s top young scientist” after inventing a bar of soap that cures melanoma, a skin cancer.
Melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer, is diagnosed in about 100,000 people in the United States each year which has killed approximately 8,000.
Bekele, a 14-year-old ninth grade from Annandale, Virginia, won the award after beating out nine other contestants.
He won $25,000 in 3M’s 2023 Young Scientist Challenge, for inventing a bar of soap that could be used to treat skin cancer, USA Today revealed.
With the prize funds, Bekele said he hoped to move his soap through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process.
He said he wished to introduce his product to the market as an affordable treatment for a disease that kills nearly 8,000 Americans a year.
“Curing cancer, one bar of soap at a time. I have always been interested in biology and technology, and this challenge gave me the perfect platform to showcase my ideas,” he said.
He disclosed that he has ambitions to expand his work in the nonprofit space in order to help as many people as possible.
The teenager also said he looks forward to moving from just focusing on cancer to topics like DNA and electrical engineering.
“I’m looking for new fields to start learning more about because I’ve almost checked off oncology on my list,” he said.
Revealing his idea, the soap was made from compounds that could reactivate dendritic cells that guard human skin, enabling them to fight cancer cells.
