Editor’s Choice Pick: “Comparing the effects of electronic cigarette smoke and conventional cigarette smoke on lung cancer viability”

Meet the Student Author

Jana Choe is a current senior at The Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts. She has always been passionate about scientific research and the study of human biology. Jana chose this research project as a continuation of a previous project where she looked at the effect of inhibition of a certain gene on the progression of lung cancer. Interested in different ways that personal habits can affect the viability of lung cancer cells, and knowing the growing concern of vape and other forms of cigarettes, she wanted to take a step further in comparing the soluble substances in each of them.

Learn More About Jana’s Research

Smoking cigarettes has a well-established link to higher rates of mouth, tongue, throat, and lung cancer. With the rise in popularity of e-cigarettes (vapes) in recent years Jana wanted to look at how lung cancer cell viability might be impacted.

Jana treated lung cancer cells with extracts from cigarette, cigar-like e-cigarette, and vape smoke using the components that were soluble in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS). She found that for all types of extract there was an increase in viability as the concentration of the extract increased. It was also seen that the vape smoke extract has the highest increase in cancer cell viability.

Since vape-type cigarettes have higher concentrations of nicotine, Jana next wanted to look at the effect on just nicotine on cancer cell viability. On its own, nicotine showed an ability to increase cell viability to a point, but that cell viability then dramatically decreased indicating a toxic concentration was used.

Jana believes that important follow-up work to this study would include looking at other characteristics beyond cell viability that can correlate with cancer progression. These additional characteristics include cell migration, invasion, and metastasis.

Check out the full manuscript to learn more about Jana’s research and see why her manuscript was selected as an Editor’s Choice manuscript.

The material on this page was prepared by Kari Mattison, JEI Editor in Chief. Jana Choe provided the photo and personal biography which was edited lightly for clarity.