Meet Jonathan Yan, the 18-year-old California student who studied 479 human cancer cell lines; when he blocked one highly active pathway, the cancer cells stopped spreading– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

18-year-old Jonathan Yan, a student from Irvine, California sucessfully stopped spread of cancer cells by blocking the transsulfuration pathway in cancer cell lines. Yan studied 479 human cancer cell lines as part of his computational biology and bioinformatics project for the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search.According to the organisers of the competition, his project focused on metastasis, the process in which cancer cells spread from their original location to other organs. Once cancer spreads, it becomes more difficult to treat.Yan’s work looked for differences between cancer cells that spread and those that did not. He built a data integration and analysis workflow to examine information from hundreds of human cancer cell lines.His analysis pointed to a particular biological process called the transsulfuration pathway. Yan found that this pathway was highly active in metastatic cancers. He then looked at what happened when the pathway was blocked in cancer cell lines.The result was significant within the cell lines he studied. When Yan blocked the pathway, the cancer cells did not spread. His findings suggest that the pathway could be important in understanding how cancer cells metastasise and how their spread might be stopped.