Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello,

My 9 year old is interested in doing this project for her school science fair. Her younger sister just finished 2 years of chemo for childhood leukemia. We are interested in making this project our own and figuring out how we can replicate the oral chemo vs intravenous chemo (i.e. through a port or lumbar puncture) that her sister has taken. We understand the point of the project is that some medicines can not be processed by the stomach or that the stomach acids would break down the medicine before it could be distributed throughout the body.

Any thoughts on how we can make this project our own and specific to chemo meds?

Thanks in advance!

What a great twist to this project. There are definitely reasons to use intravenous chemotherapy and oral chemotherapy. I'm thinking that this experiment could be related to a chemotherapy that would lose it's activity in the stomach. I looked and could not find a ready example and plan to keep looking. This experiment could be done along with research on chemotherapy drugs.

There are also chemotherapy drugs that are taken orally and need the stomach action to be activated. These are called prodrugs and one example drug that is variations of 5-FU.

I hope this helps and let me know if you have other questions.

I agree with the previous poster- great idea! It could be interesting to read about different types of chemotherapy drugs to figure out how they work, which are proteins, etc. You can also research different ways that proteins can be denatured, like low pH and high temperature.

I found one childhood leukemia drug called asparaginase that is delivered intravenously. This is a protein that breaks down the amino acid asparagine. (Side note: -ase is a suffix that means something is an enzyme, so "asparagin-ase" = the enzyme that breaks down asparagine!) Regular cells can make this amino acid on their own. However, some cancer cells cannot, so they rely on free asparagine in the plasma. When a patient is treated with this enzyme, it breaks down the free asparagine, essentially starving the cancer cells.