Henry's research fights cancer

No one would guess, upon first meeting her, that she is responsible for a cancer-fighting vitamin, soon to hit drug stores across the country. But though Eve Henry '05 has been enjoying a typical first few weeks on campus, starting new classes and meeting new people, her past four years have hardly been typical.

Henry worked at a lab at Rutgers University throughout high school where she devised a way to turn PEITC, a chemo-preventative compound found in plants, into the form of a vitamin. She both co-wrote a paper published last May in the Journal of Neutroceutical, Functional & Medical Foods and wrote her own paper for the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search, where she was selected a finalist.

Henry's interest in cancer prevention began when she was very young. Her childhood best friend, Adam, was diagnosed with leukemia at age six and passed away the next year. Henry has also lost both of her grandfathers and her uncle to cancer.

"It has been something at such a very early age that I was forced to understand and be exposed to," she explained. "It was one of my first true feelings of powerlessness. There was no cure, there wasn't anything I could do. They could do a few things but there wasn't an answer for it. I became extremely interested in it."

Henry's family decided to move to Armonk, NY, a small town in Westchester County, so that Henry could attend Byram Hills High School, a school with an exceptional program in scientific research led by teachers known for moving interested students in the right direction and helping them get into professional labs, Henry said.

"By the time I was a freshman, I started reading a whole bunch of articles on cancer. Basically, I was reading every single thing I could find. I spent probably two hours every day reading scientific articles from journals and I did that for a whole year," she said.

As Henry's interest in cancer became more focused, she began to read and learn more about the compound PEITC.

One of the most promising compounds in cancer research today, PEITC was recently discovered to have cancer fighting properties and the ability to shrink tumors, according to Henry.

PEITC comes from a specific variety of vegetables and is released when the plant is threatened, such as when it suffers physical trauma or is infected by a fungus. A study of smokers in 1998 showed that eating watercress, a vegetable high in PEITC, nearly eliminated the ill effects of smoking.

"When that happened, it basically set off thousands of studies around the world and grabbed so much attention for the compound," Henry said.

But Henry began to see there was a problem.

"The problem was that the compound is new. And it has to be made synthetically, and once it's made synthetically, it has years and years of [Food and Drug Administration] testing before it's approved and gets on the market. And it literally is 20 years away before anyone is going to be able to see this drug," she explained.

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"Since it's direct from a plant, you always have the option of making a neutroceutical [a vitamin], and vitamins aren't FDA approved. If you want to make a vitamin, you can get a drug company to make it in a year or two. So I was thinking that if it can be on the market and be made available for people who know about it to take it and for doctors to suggest that people start getting on this vitamin, then it can be of some use now. So basically, I figured out how to make it into a vitamin," Henry said.

Making PEITC into a vitamin was how Henry devoted the rest of her high school years. But she faced several obstacles at the beginning. Getting accepted into Rutgers University's biotech center, one of the country's leading research facilities, was far from easy. At first, the lab told her that they would not even consider people who did not hold doctorate degrees, Henry explained.

"It took forever to get into this lab. I had to stalk them. Serious stalking," Henry said.

"I was a ninth grader, showing up in a little skirt, being like 'please, let me in,' " she added, laughing.

But once she started showing up regularly, and when they realized the scope of her knowledge on cancer at such a young age, the lab began to take her more seriously, she said.

Henry soon came under the wing of Dr. David Ribnicky, a scientist at the lab who became Henry's mentor and partner in future research.

"He was so nice and he really wanted to have me. He really took the time to teach me how to do things," Henry said.

Ribnicky had spent many years creating the extraction process of PEITC and determining the best way to get the compound out of a leaf of watercress.

Henry began to question this extraction process and take the research further, performing several experiments with PEITC. She spent months testing the levels of the compound in different vegetables and found that watercress had significantly more PEITC than other vegetables. As a result, it became the main focus of her study.

Henry also tested her mentor's claim that extracting the PEITC and putting it into one's system was the same as chewing the actual plant.

Henry's experiment had significant results.

"It showed that you actually get more PEITC from a compound by the extraction method than you would if you chewed it and swallowed it yourself. So taking the vitamin is actually better than eating a real plant," she explained.

Henry spent the fall of her senior year, in addition to writing her college applications, working on two research papers, one which she co-authored with Ribnicky — combining both his extraction method and her own research — and one which was entered in the Intel competition.

Soon after the joint paper was published, Henry said, they sold the rights to the research to Solgar pharmaceuticals, who had been pursuing the project from the start. The release date was set for Sept. 29, and the vitamin is expected to be in stores this month.

Henry said she is just as excited about what lies ahead at Princeton as she is about her work over the past year. She is pre-med and said she hopes to be a trauma surgeon. She is applying to be a member of the Princeton First Aid and Rescue Squad, where she will be trained and eventually become a full-time EMT. Henry is also captain of the Mathey College intramural soccer team.

In high school, Henry wasn't always comfortable talking about her scientific research with others, she said. She "hated always having to explain myself," she said. At Princeton she said she loves "just the fact that I mentioned it to someone and they thought it was so cool."