A 14-year-old boy, Heman Bekele, has emerged “America’s top young scientist” after inventing a bar of soap that cures melanoma, a skin cancer.
The middle school teen, ninth grade from Annandale, Virginia, won the award after beating out nine other finalist.
Melanoma, most dangerous type of skin cancer, is diagnosed in about 100,000 people in the United States each year which has killed approximately 8,000 persons.
Bekele, won $25,000 in 3M’s 2023 Young Scientist Challenge, for inventing a bar of soap that could be used to treat skin cancer, USA Today revealed.
With the prize funds, the teen said he hoped to move his soap through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process.
He also wished to introduce his product to the market as an affordable treatment for a disease that kills nearly 8,000 Americans yearly.
“Curing cancer, one bar of soap at a time. I have always been interested in biology and technology, and this challenge gave me the perfect platform to showcase my ideas,” he said.
Bekele revealed that in order to assist as many people as possible, he hopes to expand his work in the nonprofit sector.
The teenager also said he looks forward to moving from just focusing on cancer to topics like DNA and electrical engineering.
“I’m looking for new fields to start learning more about because I’ve almost checked off oncology on my list,” he said.
Heman Bekele noted that the soap was made from compounds that could reactivate dendritic cells that guard human skin, enabling them to fight cancer cells.
