Upper St. Clair students win regional ExploraVision honors

If anything is to be remembered from the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage” beside Raquel Welch, it’s the plot line of humans being shrunken to microscopic sizes to repair a scientist’s blood clot.

Harry Funk/The Almanac
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Carter McClintock-Comeaux displays the nanobot prototype.
Three students at Upper St. Clair’s Fort Couch Middle School have come up with their own version of the film’s idea involving technology that actually could be on the horizon.
Eighth-graders Carter McClintock-Comeaux, Daniel Wang and Qadir Khan developed a concept for a Coronary Artery Disease Prevention System using infinitesimal devices known as nanobots.
Their research project has been selected as one of two dozen regional winners, and one of only six in the seventh-through-ninth-grade category, in the 27th annual ExploraVision program, sponsored by National Science Teachers Association and Toshiba.
“You are one of 24 winning teams out of close to 5,000 teams that entered this year,” Toshiba representative Brian Misho told the students. “That’s pretty special.”

Harry Funk/The Almanac
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Daniel Wang
Misho joined the students’ family members and school officials at a recent celebration at Fort Couch Middle School. Qadir, Daniel and Carter gave a presentation detailing their project, in which they identified a problem and developed a solution based on “a technology that could be used realistically in the future if some sort of scientific breakthrough occurs,” according to gifted education teacher Jason O’Roark, their ExploraVision coach.
The students selected coronary artery disease based on its status as one of the most common types of cardiovascular disease, which is responsible for about one out of every four deaths in the United States.
“Coronary artery disease causes heart attacks in patients by having plaque buildup stop the flow of blood in the arteries,” Qadir said. “And so for our solution, we decided to utilize nanotechnology to clean out the plaque in the arteries and therefore prevent heart attacks.”
As the students learned through their research, nanotechnology deals with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometers. To put that into perspective, it would take about 750 objects of that size to constitute to width of a human hair.
“With clinical surgery, nanobots have actually been tested in animals and a few people,” Qadir said. “And most of these clinical trials have been successful, which makes the field of nanotechnology very promising.”
Daniel addressed the logistics of how a nanobot would work in the context of a Coronary Artery Disease Prevention System.

Harry Funk/The Almanac
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Qadir Khan
“Power efficiency was a major component of our nanobots, and our nanobots needed a stable, reliable source of energy,” he said.
The solution is to mount them with conductors that would combine with electrolytes in the bloodstream to produce a battery effect. Navigation would be achieved through transducers producing ultrasonic signals to be sent to the surgeons performing such procedures, which would begin by having nanobots injected into the subjects’ veins, Daniel said.
“Once the nanobots get into the body, the surgeons won’t have to control them throughout the entire period because the nanobots will have a special coded algorithm that will direct them from the vein to the coronary arteries,” Daniel said. “Once inside the nanobots are inside the coronary arteries, the surgeons will direct them to use their mechanical arms to scrape out the plaque inside of the body.”
At the conclusion of the procedure, the nanobots would leave the body through the bowel system, Daniel said.
The Fort Couch team now advances to the national phase of the competition, where participants will have a chance to win $10,000 U.S. savings bond. To prepare, the students built a larger than scale nanobot prototype, produced a video and developed a website with the assistance of Fort Couch Middle School teacher Bethany Mittelman.
Since its inception in 1992, more than 400,000 students in the United States and Canada have participated in the ExploraVision program. For more information, visit www.exploravision.org.

Harry Funk/The Almanac
Jason O’Roark speaks about his students’ project.