Moorestown Friends Student Wins Funding for Heart Disease Research

A junior at Moorestown Friends School is one of 10 students nationwide to win a 2015 Cogito Research Award from the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY).

Edward Gelernt won for his proposal titled “Effects of PON1 and ApoA-I Variants on Antioxidant Ability of HDL.”

The honor includes a grant to fund his research, which he will use to test variants of three important proteins that make up high-density lipoproteins to determine which are most effective in preventing low-density lipoprotein oxidation.

He hopes his research can be used to help doctors determine patients’ susceptibility to heart disease.

“You’ve probably heard of ‘good cholesterol’ and ‘bad cholesterol,’” Gelernt said in a release issued by the school on Thursday. “The ‘good cholesterol’ is associated with high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and the ‘bad cholesterol’ is associated with low-density lipoprotein (LDL). The prevailing hypothesis for how heart disease develops is that the LDL becomes oxidized. Research has shown that HDL can protect LDL from becoming oxidized.

“In an experiment that I came across, researchers put LDL, HDL, and various combinations of these HDL-associated proteins together in petri dishes. They incubated the proteins together, and then they added oxidizing agents. What they found was that co-incubating these proteins can help protect the LDL from oxidation.

“What I plan to do is basically replicate this experiment – but with variant forms of these proteins to see which ones are most or least effective in protecting against oxidation. The results could hypothetically allow DNA or protein sampling to be used as another biomarker in determining a patient’s susceptibility to heart disease.”

His research, which is also his Moorestown Friends School Capstone Project, will be supervised by Science & Engineering Department Chair Barb Kreider. Gelernt will blog about his progress on Cogito.org and submit a final report.

First awarded in 2014, the CTY Cogito Research Awards are part of Cogito.org’s mission to foster the development of promising young scientists and create a community that includes peers as well as working scientists and mathematicians. Cogito features science, engineering, math, and technology news as well as discussion forums.

The attached image of Edward Gelernt was provided by Moorestown Friends School.