Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello, my name is Sean, and I am a highschool senior attempting to do a science fair project this year . I am just beggining the project and I need help forming my experiments and finding a specific topic I may do. My interests are to study and develope possible treatments for cancer, and to find new ways to create insulin for Diabetes' patients, that would make it easier for them to access the important medicine. Some ideas I have for cancer is to study different types of herbs and plants that could possibly help cure or treat the effects of cancer, or to experiment new ways to kill the cancer cells or dangerous side effects that it creates. For the diabetes, my idea is to possibly create a solid pill-like medicine that could be used to supplement the insulin (AKA Im trying to find if I can make a pill for insulin, getting it away from only being intravenous based or powder based.) For both these ideas, I need help to find out where to start, how to do it, and what I could possibly do.
Sincerely,
Sean

Hello, my name is Sean, and I am a high school senior attempting to do a science fair project this year . I am just beginning the project and I need help forming my experiments and finding a specific topic I may do. My interests are to study and develop possible treatments for cancer, and to find new ways to create insulin for Diabetes' patients, that would make it easier for them to access the important medicine. Some ideas I have for cancer is to study different types of herbs and plants that could possibly help cure or treat the effects of cancer, or to experiment new ways to kill the cancer cells or dangerous side effects that it creates. For the diabetes, my idea is to possibly create a solid pill-like medicine that could be used to supplement the insulin (AKA I’m trying to find if I can make a pill for insulin, getting it away from only being intravenous based or powder based.) For both these ideas, I need help to find out where to start, how to do it, and what I could possibly do .
Sincerely,
Sean

Hi Sean,

Welcome to Science Buddies! You are off to a great start with your ideas. Have you looked at the Topic Selection Wizard to help you think of projects?
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ndaproject

Here is a Science Buddies project related to cancer:
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p011.shtml

Your diabetes idea is a bit more complicated. People with Type I diabetes are unable to make insulin. Those people inject insulin to replace the hormone they are missing. The reason they cannot take an oral form of insulin is because insulin is a protein-based hormone. Since your stomach is very efficient at breaking down proteins, not enough insulin would be absorbed into the bloodstream to be useful. People with Type II diabetes do not make enough of the insulin receptor. For those people, taking insulin does not help, because their cells do not respond to the insulin. That's why Type II diabetics have to use diet and exercise to control their disease.

I hope this information helps you get started. Please post back (in this thread) with any more questions you have!

Heather

Thank you Heather !!! I do have a couple more questions though :l . I have narrowed down my project ideas down to trying to find out if herbs has an positive effect in preventing and battling cancer. Such that are possible herbs like Misletoe and Hoxsey effective in curing Cancer and/or it's symptoms. The problem i have is that I dont know how to count cancer cells, which one's to use (like is brain cancer cells function, and are composed the same way as pancreatic cancer cells, or are they different?), and which herbs I can use, and I dont know where to look for the materials to find the answers to these questions.

Hi Sean,

Cell culture is not my area of expertise, but here is a link to a previous forum thread that should answer most of your questions:
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... f=3&t=1032

Take a look, and please post again if you have more questions. If I can't help you directly, there are other experts in this forum who have expertise in laboratory techniques like cell culture.

I hope this helps!

Heather