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Ethiopia-born Heman Bekele is on TIME’s latest cover as the 2024 Kid of the Year.
What would you say if someone told you that skin cancer could be cured by using a bar of soap? Awesome, right? Fifteen-year-old Heman Bekele is on a path to that reality. He has developed a bar soap that could one day treat and prevent multiple forms of skin cancer. Last October, he won the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, taking home a $25,000 grant after delivering his pitch to a panel of judges. The grant, Bekele says, will help advance research for the bar soap and contribute to furthering his education.
Bekele, who now lives in Arlington, Virginia, was born in Ethiopia and lived in the East African country until age four, when he emigrated to the U.S. with his family. He’s had a passion for science, “since before I can remember. I’ve just had such a huge love for just knowing things about this world and being curious and really asking questions.” That curiosity led to numerous experiments and, with his keen eye for observation, culminated in this already groundbreaking work at an early age.
Partially growing up in Ethiopia, Bekele saw people working long hours under the hot sun, many of them with little to no layering or clothing, and it’s stayed with him ever since. His parents also impressed upon him and his siblings the importance of not staying out too long directly under the sun without sunscreen or good clothing. Finding out the difference between skin cancer survival rates in Africa and places with better treatment resources, he started thinking of ways to create an accessible, cheaper, but effective cure.
“Skin cancer is mostly found on people who live within developing countries,” Bekele said after winning the 3M Young Scientist Challenge last year. “But the average price for an operation is $40,000. I was devastated by the idea of people having to choose between treatment and putting food on the table for their families. There are so many preventable deaths.”
During his research, he found out about imiquimod, a body cream often prescribed as part of treating skin cancer. Going off that, he started trying to create a bar soap that could be used to deliver the necessary drugs to skin cancer patients. After months of working with salicylic acid, glycolic acid and tretinoin, Bekele developed SCTS, which stands for skin cancer treating soap.
The soap works to reactivate the skin’s dendritic cells, which helps protect the skin by boosting immune response.
“I think that my main goal here was not only to fight against skin cancer, but to find a more affordable and accessible approach to it,” Bekele told PBS earlier this year. “And so with that, you really need to find a completely different way towards the traditional form of treating skin cancer, which really is surgery or radiation therapy or something like that.” It led him to think of “topical application” and he reached the bar soap as his final product.
Heman Bekele was recently conferred the honor of being TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2024, speaking to how popular he and his potentially momentous creation are. “There’s still a long way to go,” Bekele says in his TIME profile, and he’s working on refining SCTS to become market viable by 2028 — while being a young teenager in high school.
