California teen finds blocking one pathway stops cancer cells from spreading

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.