The cancer-fighting teen

Shivani Sud (right) with Jan Davidson of the Davidson Institute.

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When Shivani Sud was six years old, a member of her immediate family had surgery to remove a brain tumor. Desperate to help, Sud dragged a stepstool to the kitchen sink, sprinkled soap on a sponge and began washing the dishes. She thought that if she helped around the house it would keep her family safe, her mother recalls, with tears welling in her eyes. The tumor was benign and her family member returned safely from the hospital, but Sud's interest in biology had been sparked.

Ten years later, Sud seems like any other 16 year old, wearing eyeliner and tolerating faded pimples, until she opens her mouth. Words like "murine IGK chain secretion-based protein transduction" roll off her tongue, and she knows exactly what it means. Tapping one cupped hand inside the other, she emphasizes the major points of her research project at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Sud, who lives in Durham, NC, has been doing cutting-edge cancer research since she was 14 years old. Getting started was difficult, she says; as an eighth grader she had trouble finding a scientific advisor. "No one trusts that you're willing to work that hard," she explains. "A lot of it comes down to maturity. They are not sure what it'll be like having someone that young in the lab."

Sud's mother, who retired from analyzing cytogenetics data to spend more time with her children, was a huge advocate for her. She helped her daughter maneuver through the schools' bureaucracies, enabling her to take all the advanced classes they offered. She even helped organize a science fair in Sud's middle school. Sud's project was to look at the effects of organic pesticides on carpet beetles, but the first place award went to another student who looked at the effect of different soaps on her own hair samples. When Sud's mother heard one of the judges mention how cute she thought the locks of hair were, she was enraged. "It is not supposed to be about something cute, it's supposed to be something scientific!" she says.

People running the science fair told Sud that she was too young to be thinking so deeply about scientific issues, she recalls with annoyance. Since then, she has lost other opportunities because of her age. "There are competitions where I've won first place, but when it comes to moving on to the next round, they want to let someone else go," says Sud. "They say 'let's send the person who's older' or 'you'll have another chance.' I think the discrimination is very unfair."

Finally, when Sud was 14, Nune Darbinian, a researcher at Temple University, agreed to have her in the lab. "It's a lot of responsibility to have someone so young in the lab," she says.

Over two summers Sud helped members of Darbinian's lab develop a new way to deliver drugs to cancer cells. Her first summer there, she worked to clone and test a vector that encoded the nuclear localization signal of HIV-1 tat, a murine Igk secretion chain, and green fluorescent protein. The next summer, she helped the lab clone Rad51 into the vector and delivered the construct to cells with damaged DNA. The Rad51 fusion construct was imported to the nucleus and exported to the periplasm, and repaired 66% of DNA breaks compared to endogenous Rad51. Her work was recognized with a $50,000 fellowship from the Davidson Institute, a Reno, NV-based organization dedicated to encouraging bright, young people to strive for excellence.

This past summer, Sud worked in Maria Tsokos's lab at the National Cancer Institute while hunting for a way to optimize the fas-mediated apoptosis pathway of neuroblastomas. The bulk of her work focused on FLICE-inhibitory protein (FLIP). Sud used different prostaglandins at varying concentrations to reduce the levels of FLIP, consequently sensitizing cells to apoptosis. She plans to continue this research next summer and study downregulators of Bar, another protein thought to inhibit apoptosis. When another high school student worked in the lab, "we were happy he wasn't contaminating cell cultures, while Shivani worked at the level of a fellow," says Tsokos.

Sud's research career is already underway, but her childhood may already be over. The Sud family used to take summer trips to national parks or Alaska, but all that stopped once Sud was spending her summers doing research, says Sud's father. "There is certainly a price to be paid," he says. "That part of childhood of running up and down the street is gone, but it's been put to more productive use."