A Chicago high school student discovered a cancer-fighting drug from an unlikely source.
Camarria Williams, 13, came across some goose poop in a neighborhood park and eagerly picked it up to be analyzed at the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab, a STEM outreach program.
She was an eighth grader at William H. Brown STEM Magnet School in Chicago and was recruited for the fourteen-week project in partnership with the Boys & Girls Club.
Ms. Williams and her mentors were looking for antibiotics from natural sources, and the students were tasked with collecting samples and taking them to the laboratory, where the team would analyze them under a microscope.
They would then be analyzed by a robot that the group had programmed to catalog and track samples for antibiotic potential.
The droppings Miss Williams collected contained the Pseudomonas idahoensis bacteria, but that was not the striking find. The team discovered that the bacteria produced a never-before-seen substance called orfamide N, which was toxic to skin and ovarian cancer cells under the microscope.
While the discovery won’t immediately lead to a cure for several types of cancer, researchers say it gives them a deeper understanding of how cancer works, which in turn helps scientists make better drugs.
Mrs Williams said: “My mother, aunt and grandmother have all had cancer so it makes me happy that something I have found could help. It makes me want to discover more things.’
The feces collected by Camarria Williams, 13, contained a new substance that scientists discovered was toxic to human melanoma and ovarian cancer cells
The substance Miss Williams discovered did not have antibacterial properties, but scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that it slowed the growth of human skin cancer and ovarian cancer cells.
She told me WashingtonPost: ‘I did something, and it worked. It feels good.
“It was a lot of fun to get out there, put on the gloves and do the science myself.”
Now she is a published scientist. The summary of the team’s findings appeared in the American Chemical Society Omega diary in October, in which Miss Williams was named co-author.
‘Now people will know me. They will know that I am a smart boy and that I am curious, Miss Williams added.
She was initially drawn to the program’s rare hands-on opportunities for local STEM students.
She told me Chicago Tribune: ‘We were walking around and they had these chemicals, and they were doing something. It was just fun.
“I just want to go out and find stuff and see what it can do.”
Dr. Brian Murphy, a pharmaceutical sciences researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, leads the program to inspire a new generation of scientists.
During the pandemic, Dr. Murphy’s lab partnered with the university’s Institute for Tuberculosis Research to purchase a $200,000 robot that could be programmed to pick up certain bacteria and transfer them to new research plates to testing for pathogens.
Ms. Williams was drawn to the program because of the unique hands-on experiences for local STEM students. She discovered the poop as part of an after-school program with the Boys & Girls Club in partnership with the University of Illinois Chicago
The students programmed the robot to do all this while quarantined at home.
After the research program, students were taught to use the robot’s findings to analyze and understand the information from their biological research to determine which ones had useful antibiotic properties.
Jin Yi Tan, a fourth-year PhD student in Dr. Murphy’s lab, said, “For Camarria, she prioritized the bacteria with antibiotic properties.
“So I followed up on the strains she prioritized, and I grew them in the lab, purified the compounds, and then did some further testing. And that’s where we found this new compound that had some cytotoxic activity against cancer cell lines.”
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Dr. Murphy said Miss Williams’ exciting finding is proof of the importance of accessible STEM programs for young people who want to become scientists.
He said: ‘What we’re really trying to do is show young students that there are many practical applications of science. We want to light a spark in them, make them care about their education and maybe even be the starting point for the next generation of biomedical researchers.”
Mrs. Williams has already made her decision.
“I want to be a scientist,” she said.