With award, Nicosia to study cancer

Columbia Falls High School junior Anna Nicosia is studying one of the most complex topics she has ever studied before, cancer. She is going to Houston this spring to do a research project with a University of Texas cancer scientist.

Nicosia, a Columbia Falls native, is one of 100 winners of the inaugural Emperor Science Award program. She’s the only recipient from Montana; the winners come from 40 states.

Last fall, she enrolled in an independent science research class with teacher Erin Quintia. She wanted to do cancer research, but didn’t know how she was going to pull that off with the closest researcher being in Missoula. She’s on the volleyball, track and speech and debate teams. She’s also involved in HOSA, a club for future health professionals.

Nicosia started independently by reading abstracts of research papers, highlighting and looking up every word she didn’t know. Finally, she got to a point when she could understand the results of the studies.

She said her research and Quintia helped her understand how cells work, but in learning about cancer, Nicosia was on her own.

Quintia was looking for research opportunities for Nicosia, then one day she told her about the Emperor award program. The deadline wasn’t until the end of the semester and Nicosia didn’t think she would win, but decided to complete the application anyway.

Nicosia said she’s interested in cancer research for right now. But, after doing a short-term internship with a researcher in Whitefish, she decided she would prefer a more hands-on medicine career. Her goal is to be a cardiothoracic surgeon. Her top choice is to go to Brown University.

She remembers asking questions about her grandfather’s prostate cancer when she was younger and not understanding what it was. She has also spent a lot of time in hospitals and doctor’s offices because her older sister, Carla, was diagnosed with diabetes and celiac disease at an early age.

Months after finishing her application and after Nicosia’s team won the volleyball championship in November, she received an email during math class.

“Oh, it’s probably just telling me I didn’t get it,” Nicosia thought as she opened the email. She didn’t look at it until she was walking down the stairs and read the first few lines of the email, “We are pleased to congratulate you ….”

“And I was like, ‘oh, no way,’” she said. “It was so surreal.” So, she immediately ran to Quintia to share the good news.

Nicosia had won participation in the mentorship program to complete a cancer research project with a mentoring scientist. It included a free Google Chromebook and a $1,500 stipend to use for the project. The award program partners with PBS LearningMedia, Stand Up To Cancer. Founding donors are Genentech, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Novartis.

For the award application, she wrote an essay about what she would study if she were a scientific researcher. She said that she had to be careful how she wrote it.

“I know that the path of cancer research in the past was kind of misleading, but I didn’t want to disparage the research that had already been done,” Nicosia said.

She wrote in her essay that cancer research in the past had spent too much money for results that didn’t produce a cure for cancer. She wrote that a possibility for future research was to look at proteins that inhibit cancer and how well patients respond to treatments.

These same topics were used to match Nicosia to a scientist.

Karina Eterovic, a cancer biologist for the past 10 years, is an associate professor at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas in Houston. Nicosia will travel to Texas for a week and a half to complete the project with Eterovic.

The biologist was surprised when she found out that Nicosia lived in Montana — she thought it would be a local student. But, they’ve made it work by video chatting and emailing about project ideas and research papers.

“I was so, so excited to have this opportunity, because I’ve actually read articles published by her,” Nicosia said. “I honestly could not have had a better match.”

Will this project change her mind about being a surgeon?

“I guess we’ll have to see after my project,” Nicosia said. Although, she really can’t see herself being in a laboratory looking through microscopes all day, she said.

Nicosia is the daughter of Susan and Michael Nicosia.