Inspirational AVS students have eight projects in BT Young Scientists final

STUDENT: Robyn Given 

CATEGORY: Intermediate Biological and Ecological 

PROJECT TITLE: Treating psoriasis with snail slime 

APPROACH: My friend’s parents recently travelled to Spain and while there they purchased a commercial mucin and aloe vera enhanced emollient cream. The sellers told them that it was effective in the treatment of psoriasis so they brought it back to their daughter to see if it would help to ease her skin rash. My friend showed me the cream and I encouraged her to try it to see if it was effective. After a few applications her rash seemed a lot less angry and after a few weeks of treatment the improvement was noticeable. This led me to research which ingredient, the aloe vera or the mucin was effective in treating her psoriasis. We have conducted a trial on a volunteer using a commercial mucin enhanced emollient cream to see if it is as effective as a topical steroid in the treatment of psoriasis. Our test with this volunteer showed that it is as useful as a prescribed topical steroid treatment in reducing skin inflammation in scaly patches in this volunteer. We now intend on creating our own mucin enhanced emollient cream using comercial mucin and a cheap emollient cream so that we can use the same non-mucin enhanced emollient cream as our control. We then intend to test our mucin enhanced emollient cream on volunteers who have psoriasis patches on their skin to see if the snail slime helps to alleviate/cure any of the scaly skin rash symptoms. We will compare the mucin enhanced emollient cream with non mucin enhanced emollient cream by measuring the area reduction in scaly skin patches. Additionally, we will test another patch with a typically prescribed topical steroid and we will again compare the plaque area reduction in both the mucin enhanced emollient cream treated patches with the topical steroid treated patches. We will use a ‘t test’ to see if any differences are statistically significant.