from Hacker News

US student, 14, wins award for developing soap to treat skin cancer

by jpster on 10/28/23, 12:18 AM with 11 comments

  • by precompute on 10/28/23, 8:37 AM

    Sigh... this is yet another case of parents instructing their children to unscrupulously pad their college applications. No 14 year old can "develop a soap" to "treat skin cancer". Does not happen.

    For these competitions, these kids only make impressive slides with huge hypotheticals. Most impressive hypothetical wins. No one's "developed" anything.

    Also, it's pretty absurd to expect a soap to treat skin cancer. The evidence for the sun inducing skin cancer is not strong. Using something to then counteract the non-existent effect might just end up becoming responsible for a form of cancer itself. After all, it's much easier to get cancer than to cure it.

  • by matteoraso on 10/28/23, 5:30 AM

    This article is remarkably sparse on details. Here's an article that explains what the soap is[0]. The TL;DR is that it uses a chemical called Imidazoquinoline, which is not yet approved for skin cancer treatment at all but is currently being investigated. The soap has not been tested on cancer patients and does not have FDA approval. I don't want to sound like I'm dunking on the kid, since he's obviously very intelligent and has a bright future ahead of him, but this isn't nearly as good as the media is making it out to be.

    [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/10/27/1209048...

  • by userinanother on 10/28/23, 3:55 PM

    Why not just mix sunscreen ingredients in soap? Then you would be providing some minimal protection all the time. It’s not super effective but you can make claims that it protects against the sun.

  • by B5C8ECB24DB47D1 on 10/29/23, 11:43 AM

  • by zubairq on 10/28/23, 6:26 AM

    Quite amazing. I am guessing that because of FDA and medical approval that the soap won't be available in US/UK?