Arpana Sood and I-June Wang, two seniors at Syosset High School, were recently named semifinalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search.

Arpana Sood has been working on her project, entitled Curcumin Inhibits Shiga Toxin (Stx)-induced Renal Tubular Cell Apoptosis for about three years. She did most of her research at Schneider Children's Hospital.

"I worked with human kidney cells and I exposed them to a toxin that causes apoptosis, or cell suicide, and there is no prevention available for this right now," said Arpana.

Arpana took the advice of her grandmother and proposed that by putting curcumin, an extract with many medical properties, into the cell culture system, it would reverse the mechanism of the toxin. Dr. Trachtman, her mentor from Schneider Children's Hospital, decided what system to use the spice in. "My grandmother is always telling my family to use the spice curcumin so I tried it," said Arpana. "We were really doubtful before we began, but it worked." Curcumin is the first substance that has shown prevention against the work of the toxin.

Although curcumin has been used in other types of systems and to study other diseases, it has never been used on human kidney cells. Arpana plans to continue her research on this topic and she is currently writing a paper to be published in a journal.

In the fall, Arpana hopes to attend Georgetown University and major in Japanese. "I will probably go into medicine," she said.

I-June Wang began work on her project, entitled Motility and Invasion in Oncogene Transformed Cells, only two months ago. She began her research at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and after about a month, she realized that her results were very inconsistent. She then started her second project, which she submitted to INTEL.

"I was so shocked that I was named a semifinalists because I had only worked on my project for two months," said I-June.

Through her research, I-June discovered that the shape of a cell and its motility are directly related. "In normal calls with a fiber glass shape, that is long and thin shaped, the cell promotes more migration while a rounder shape cell promotes less migration," I-June explained. "This is not something that I thought in the beginning but something that we figured out by looking at our results."

I-June did her research with Dr. Lu-Hai Wang from the School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai Medical Center and together they treated cells with drugs to try and stop that migration.

"When you have cancer, it does not just stay in one place, but it invades other organ sites," said I-June. "Trying to stop the migration or motility with drugs is what people do. We were looking at the results after we treated the cells with drugs and the results were so inconsistent and we could not figure out why. Then we thought that maybe the shape had something to do with it because we were using different cells. All of these cells we looked at will eventually become a cancer cell (Oncogene)."

I-June was accepted early decision to New York University and will study there in the fall. She hopes to become a teacher and wants to double major in education and music.

Both Arpana and I-June participated in Syosset High School's Research Program, which was expanded in 1997 as part of a research initiative. The program, which begins in the ninth grade, offers students the opportunity to learn advanced research skills. They then apply the organizational, investigatory, critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills they have learned, to study areas of particular interest. They may choose to conduct original research in science, mathematics or the social sciences.

The 300 semifinalists in this year's Intel Science Talent Search were chosen from among 1,592 entrants and represent 36 states.