Calgary teens look to change the world at prestigious science fair

Using cows blood to help reduce a global blood shortage for transfusions and detecting Alzheimer's in a revolutionary way, are projects two Calgary high school students are taking to a prestigious science fair in Edmonton next week, as they look to change the world.

Faris Fizal, a student at Westmount Charter School, and Aaron Abraham, a Webber Academy student, head to the Sanofi Biogenius Canada regional competition to face the judges on Tuesday.

"It involves several rounds of presenting your project to groups of judges," Fizal told The Homestretch on Thursday.

"You have your poster behind you, you are just explaining your project, your data and all of your results."

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Abraham says his project is about finding Alzheimer's disease in ways that are not yet common.

"Currently when we diagnose Alzheimer's disease, we use imaging or clinical criteria like memory loss," Abraham said.

"Often they are not exclusive or often expensive to do. My method uses the data from your blood to diagnose using a few chemical concentrations."

He says it's about advancing our current medical understanding.

"As we move on for medicine, the nexus between technology, machine-learning and artificial intelligence, that's the new path for medicine. It started back in Grade 9. I noticed there are a few chemical concentrations that change. I thought, I could probably make a computer algorithm that detects it."

Computational simulations on hemoglobin molecule

Fizal says a century of research into blood alternatives recently stalled, so he's studying alternative forms of hemoglobin — the oxygen-carrying protein that exists inside all red blood cells.

"Internationally there is this huge shortage of blood transfusions. In Venezuela people are paying others just to get blood transfusions. I am looking at alternatives. In the past 10 years or so, a lot of this research has slowed down because there has just been no success," Fizal said.

"In the past, scientists took cows' blood and extracted the protein hemoglobin which is what transports oxygen in our blood. They would take it out of cows' blood and transfuse it into patients after being processed. The problem with hemoglobin on its own is that it's pretty unstable. I am taking the hemoglobin molecule and running some computational simulations on it."

It's about more options, he said.

"I am simulating the molecule to see why it's so unstable and how it breaks down.

"With this project, hopefully I will be able to develop new versions of these hemoglobin molecules, slightly modified, that can be used as alternatives."

'Just high school students having a good time'

Abraham says it's some tough competition.

"A solid oral presentation is always a good start but it's the idea that you come up with. The scientific method that you use to also achieve that goal is also very important," he said.

And while it's a competition, Fizal says the competitors generally are a good group of people.

"We are all just high school students having a good time," Fizal said.

"We all kind of form this community and even though we have different projects and we are competing with one another, we still talk to each other like friends and collaborate if we need help."

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With files from The Homestretch