Model student
4 of 4
A successful milestone
The prospect of working with Dr. Cox on a research project that could potentially help his own family and thousands of people worldwide who carry SDHB mutations accelerated Alex’s recovery from surgery. “He’s incredibly enthusiastic,” Dr. Cox says, chuckling. “Most of the time we have to rein him in a little because his enthusiasm often gets ahead of where his knowledge base is.” To bring him up to speed, Alex says, “Greg got me a grant, three Internet windows and a dictionary.” He says the entire lab group was “incredibly helpful and supportive.”
Alex is now a high school senior and enjoying life symptom-free. “For college I’m definitely going to pursue something in science,” he says. “I want to thank everyone at The Jackson Laboratory for giving me this opportunity. I’ve lived in three countries, but I’ve never before heard of high school students interning at a world-class facility, and being able to do their own research projects.”
The team has had its first successful milestone: the birth of several litters of mice that are confirmed to carry the mutation that matches the one in Alex’s family. According to Dr. Cox, the next step is simply to wait and see whether these mice develop the same kinds of tumors that occur in people with FP. Some FP patients develop tumors at a very young age, as Alex did, but others can live 60 or 70 years before tumors appear. That would compare to a typical mouse age of two years.
“Sometimes you get exactly the same disease symptoms in patients and in the relevant mouse model,” Dr. Cox says, “and sometimes they can be quite different. So until we ‘age’ these animals and study the disease process in them, we won’t know whether we’ve got a good model for this particular cancer, even if we know it carries the same genetic mutation that patients carry.”
If the team does find a good model for FP, they will try to get drug companies interested in testing compounds on it, in order to identify potential therapies for people at risk of developing the cancer.
Not quite your average high school science project.
