The following was adapted from an article by Jeffrey Kluger in the Aug. 15, 2024, issue of Time.
Born in Addis Ababa, [Ethiopia,] before emigrating to the U.S. with his family when he was 4, Heman Bekele recalls that some of his earliest memories were of seeing laborers working in the blistering sun, usually with no protection for their skin. His parents taught him and his sisters … to cover up, and explained the dangers of too much time outdoors without sunscreen or proper clothing.
“When I was younger, I didn’t think much of it, but when I came to America, I realized what a big problem the sun and ultraviolet radiation is when you’re exposed to it for a long time,” Bekele says.
It didn’t take too long for him to start thinking about how he might help. A few years ago, he read about imiquimod, a drug that, among other uses, is approved to fight one form of skin cancer and has shown promise against several more. Typically, imiquimod, which can help destroy tumors and usually comes in the form of a cream, is prescribed as a frontline drug as part of a broader cancer treatment plan, but Bekele wondered if it could be made available more easily to people in the earliest stages of the disease. A bar of soap, he reckoned, might be just the delivery system for such a lifesaving drug, not just because it was simple, but because it would be a lot more affordable than the $40,000 it typically costs for skin-cancer treatment.
“What is one thing that is an internationally impactful idea, something that everyone can use, [regardless of] socioeconomic class?” Bekele recalls thinking. “Almost everyone uses soap and water for cleaning. So soap would probably be the best option.”
There was a long way to go between inspiration and application, however. Executing on his idea was more complicated than simply mixing the drug into an ordinary bar of soap, since any therapeutic power the imiquimod might confer would just be washed down the drain with the suds. The answer was to combine the soap with a lipid-based nanoparticle that would linger on the skin when the soap was washed away—much the way moisturizer or fragrance can stay behind after the suds are rinsed off.
There was only so much brainstorming Bekele could do on his own, however. Then, in 2023, he came across the 3M challenge and submitted a video explaining his idea. Soon, he received an invite to the company’s headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota, to deliver a pitch in front of a panel of judges. Before that day was out, he’d been named the winner. The $25,000 prize, he knew, would go a long way toward helping him afford to pursue his research, but he’d still need a professional lab in which to conduct the work. That opportunity arrived in February, when he attended a networking event hosted by the Melanoma Research Alliance, in Washington, D.C. There, he met Vito Rebecca, a molecular biologist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. …
For close to half a year now, Bekele and Rebecca have been running basic research on mice, injecting the animals with strains of skin cancer and preparing to apply the lipid-bound, imiquimod-infused soap and see what the results are. And though they’re getting ready to test it and a control against melanoma, Bekele knows “there’s still a long way to go”—not just testing the soap but also patenting it and getting FDA certification, which can take a decade altogether. …
For all of this, Bekele remains humble about what he’s accomplished in just 15 years. “Anybody could do what I did,” he says. “I just came up with an idea. I worked toward that idea, and I was able to bring it to life.” But he confesses that he worries too: Scientific breakthroughs seem to be coming faster and faster—in medicine, in engineering, in artificial intelligence—and he frets that people may have reached something of a saturation point.
“A lot of people have this mindset that everything’s been done, there’s nothing left for me to do,” he says. “To anybody having that thought, [I’d say] we’ll never run out of ideas in this world. Just keep inventing. Keep thinking of new ways to improve our world and keep making it a better place.”
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