Home remedy test brings rewards to science students

EDMONTON -- Sixteen-year-old Julia Grochowski calls it a year of seconds.

She and Andrew Guardamano, 18, placed second at a regional competition with their project "Lobitonin in Cancer Treatment." They fared as well at the Aventis Biotech Challenge and at the Intel International Science and Engineer Fair.

Recently, the pair brought home yet another silver medal, this time from the International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Ariz.

The Alberta ScienceFair Foundation financed their $10,000, week-long trip, making them the first students to be sponsored by the foundation.

"We are very pleased just having provided both students with this experience," said Kay J. Jauch, executive director of the Alberta ScienceFair Foundation.

"We hope that the experiences of our national, and now international participants, will encourage other young

Albertans, their teachers and their parents to get involved."

Guardamano and Grochowski didn't let the foundation down. In an event where more than 1,200 students from four dozen countries competed, they took home second prize in the medicine and health category.

"The whole experience was just really amazing," said Guardamano. "We were thinking of just going for the experience. We didn't expect to win anything. Of course, we were going to do our best."

Guardamano, who attends Archbishop McDonald, and Grochowski, an Old Scona Academic student, spent three years studying an Asian fruit and its relationship to cancer. The initial idea for their project stems back to Guardamano's grandmother, Flora Lacson.

Four decades ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was in its final stages, it was the 1960s and medicine was doing little for her.

It was then when Lacson, a resident of the Philippines, remembered a local fruit known to cure bumps and bruises without causing side-effects. With nothing to lose, she applied it for several months.

It might have been a coincidence, it might have been a misdiagnosis. But a trip to the doctor a few months later revealed the cancer was gone.

"That's where we got the initiative to investigate this fruit and see if it had any anti-cancer properties," Grochow-ski said.

As they discovered, it did.

After exposing the fruit compound to three types of the disease -- leukemia, pancreatic and glioma -- it wasn't long before the pair's hypothesis turned into a definite conclusion. The more fruit extract they added, the more cancer cells they killed.

In 24 hours, it destroyed 85 per cent of leukemia cells.

Guardamano was "quite ecstatic" with the results. He encourages all students to participate in science fairs.

"It allows us to experience science in a way kids our age never thought was possible," he said.

The two cannot disclose which fruit they based their project on because they're applying for a patent.

"It's kind of a big secret right now," Guardamano said.

In time, though, the whole world might know the secret to their success.

© The Edmonton Journal 2005