Sriharshita Musunuri from Mill Creek has won a prestigious
$25,000 dollar scholarship in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and
Technology. Sriharshita Musunuri’s research focuses on sepsis, which is one of
the leading causes of death in U.S. hospitals.
Sepsis is when your body has an overactive response to
infection. It can lead to organ failure. According to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, a quarter million Americans die every year from sepsis.
Musunuri, a student at Henry M. Jackson High School, got
interested in doing this research after reading that horseshoe crab blood is
used to detect a bacterial toxin that can cause sepsis. She said horseshoe crab
blood can cost $15,000 per quart. So Musunuri created a tiny synthetic particle
that could be used to detect and quantify the toxin.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done to get it to the
stage where you’d be able to implement it within a hospital, but working with
the results that I have now, that’s hopefully the path that I’m headed on,” she
said.
Musunuri initially started her work with the University of
Washington and then continued with Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology. She
plans to continue working on her nanoparticle with the hopes of eventually
finding a commercial application for it.
“I’m hoping that if we can actually quantify the
concentration of this toxin within a couple minutes, rather than having to wait
for a blood test, which would take several hours, then we could potentially
improve patient outcomes,” she said.
She presented her results at the national Siemens
Competition in Washington, D.C. She said she hopes to study either chemical
biological engineering or materials sciences in college.
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