Area Student’s Science Fair Project Targets Cancer

Thousands of students all over the area have started working on their science fair projects, hoping to prove their hypothesis. Not many middle school projects will have the medical consequences as one of our area students. Alex Misiaszek, a student at The Nysmith School in Herndon is working on a cure for cancer.

Alex discovered last year while doing his school science fair that by taking the DNA from a coral cell, dying it red, and inserting it into an E. coli cell, that the host organism would pass the new trait to it’s offspring. This year he is mapping the DNA from a molecule from the Brazilian Wasp called MP1 and mapping the DNA from cancer cells to be able to direct the MP1 to the cancer. Alex presented his research to the Baltimore Under Ground Science Space (BUGSS) as well as a researcher from Howard Hughes Medical Center.