The latest recipient of the title "America's Top Young Scientist" is a 14-year-old teen from Virginia. Heman Bekele clinched the esteemed award presented by 3M and Discovery Education for his groundbreaking creation: a compound based bar of soap designed to treat skin cancer. Bekele joined TheStreet to discuss how his innovation is revolutionizing the treatment for people battling melanoma.
Full Video Transcript Below:
J.D. DURKIN: So let's talk about the genesis, the origin. How did this idea come to you and how were you able to make it a reality? It is so, so impressive.
HEMAN BEKELE: Yeah, sure. SCTS which is my bar of soap. It stands for skin cancer treating soap. I think my main inspiration for originally creating this bar of soap was when I was growing up in Ethiopia, and I always saw people who were constantly hit by the glaring sun. And when I was younger, I didn't really think much of it. But as I grew up, I started to realize that this is a concern and it's a prevalent issue. So then I started to think about ways I could come up with solutions, because sun exposure does lead to skin cancer and different really, really nasty diseases.
So the issue is, although there might be cures for the diseases, they're expensive. And I mean really expensive, almost like the global average price of skin cancer treatment is $40,000. And that's crazy to me. So I tried to come up with a more affordable and accessible cure to the same type of diseases like basal cell carcinoma or squamous cell skin carcinoma, those type of skin cancers. And that really inspired me and that was my main motivation to create this affordable and accessible treatment.
J.D. DURKIN: You talked about the price point before, right? Some of the challenges that maybe melanoma patients or people with a type of carcinoma have. And we know the exorbitant health care costs that can go into a serious diagnosis like this. Your price point is a really important part of, as I understand it, your vision on how you want to see this go. Talk to me kind of about that price point and and what can people expect?
HEMAN BEKELE: Sure so as of right now, for my initial prototype and of course, there's a lot of work that could be done to still continue to cut down that cost. But for a batch of 10 bars of soap, it costs as little as $8.50. And like I was saying earlier, with the huge price of average skin cancer treatment, I think this is definitely a huge jump from where we used to be with $40,000 for one singular skin cancer treatment process. So that's the price of my skin cancer treating soap. However, there is a lot of factors that could help cut down that price even more, right? Like, for example, for the 3M Young Scientist challenge, I was required to use 3M cavalon and that's great because it's really affordable, but there are even more options or things I can mix in with it to lower the amount that I'm using, which would actually help with the price point and make it even cheaper.
