A 14-year-old student from Fairfax, Virginia, Heman Bekele, has developed an innovative soap that holds promise in the potential treatment of skin cancer.
A 14-year-old student from Fairfax, Virginia, Heman Bekele, has developed an innovative soap that holds promise in the potential treatment of skin cancer.
Fairfax County Public Schools(NEW YORK) A 14-year-old student has created a new kind of soap that he hopes could potentially be used to treat skin cancer someday.
Heman Bekele, a high school student in Fairfax, Virginia, says it costs only $8.50 to create a batch of 20 bars of the soap, which he calls Skin Cancer Treating Soap, or SCTS.
"People might not have the equipment or have the facilities to be able to treat this disease," Heman told ABC News about the innovation, which he said could eventually be used in the early stages of skin cancer if proven to be effective. "A bar of soap is just so simple, so affordable, so accessible in comparison to these modern new skin cancer treatments."
According to Heman, who created the soap in 8th grade, when skin cancer cells develop, they weaken dendritic cells in the body that boost human immune responses, allowing the cancer to take over. He said SCTS contains agents that could potentially reactivate dendritic cells t