Portrait of Ava Grace Cummings along with the image of a common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Credits – Instagram/lumbeetribencgov, Wikimedia Commons
Cummings, a member of the Lumbee and Coharie tribes, won second place and $175,000 in the 2025 competition for a study that used laboratory fruit flies to model STAC3 disorder, a rare genetic muscular condition. GeneReviews estimates that STAC3 disorder affects about one in 5,000 Lumbee Native Americans. Because its short life cycle makes it possible to alter genes and observe changes over a relatively short period, the fruit fly is widely used in genetics research.
She told the Society for Science that seeing friends and family in the Lumbee Tribe struggle with the disease motivated her to raise awareness and look for potential treatments. She has said she hopes her study will bring greater attention, funding and therapeutic interest to illnesses that impact small, unique populations and are otherwise easily overlooked by the broader medical research system. The Regeneron Science Talent Search is described by the Society for Science as the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and maths competition for high school seniors. It makes sense that most projects address issues that are somewhat unrelated to the researcher’s personal life. Ava Grace Cummings made the opposite decision. The senior from Smithfield, North Carolina, who is eighteen years old, based her research on an illness she had personally witnessed in the faces of people she knew. The flies were then used to test alternative therapies, including one based on traditional Indigenous herbal medicine. Formerly known as Native American myopathy, STAC3 disorder is a congenital ailment that lowers muscle tone from birth and can cause joint stiffness, a cleft palate, a bent spine, and a potentially fatal reaction to some anaesthetic medications. It was initially identified in babies from the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina in the late 1980s, and it was subsequently linked to a single genetic mutation that was inherited among the group. The condition has also been identified in other populations, including patients in southern Africa. For Cummings, STAC3 disorder was never an abstract condition. There is no cure for STAC3 disorder, making the search for possible therapies an important part of her project. To study the rare muscle condition without human patients, Cummings turned to Drosophila. Cummings created a strain of flies that did not express the dstac gene, the fly counterpart of the gene disrupted in STAC3 disorder. The resulting flies showed muscle-weakness traits that allowed her to model the condition in the laboratory. Rather than seeing Indigenous medicine and pharmaceutical research as two separate worlds, Cummings considers her study an attempt to bring the two into parity.
