Meet Claire Jiang, the 18-year-old New Jersey student diagnosed with juvenile arthritis in third grade who built a lab model of the disease; her research won $70,000

Claire Jian, Bergen County Academies, Hackensack, NJ (Source: Society for Science)

An 18-year-old student who was diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis in primary school has won seventh place and a $70,000 award in the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search for developing a new laboratory cell model of the disease. Claire Jiang, a senior at Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey, received the award during the annual competition run by Society for Science in Washington, DC. According to the award announcement from Society for Science and Regeneron, Jiang finished seventh among nearly 2,000 high school applicants from across the United States for her research into juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), the most common form of arthritis in children. Jiang’s personal experience with the condition inspired her research. She first developed symptoms at nine years old and wanted to tackle a major problem in paediatric rheumatology: the lack of easy-to-use, disease-specific cell models for laboratory research.

Personal experience drives biomedical innovation

Jiang remembered the sudden start of her illness during a classroom exam in third grade. She developed a fever, swollen joints and difficulty moving her elbow. After being diagnosed with JIA, she learned that treatment options for young patients were limited, partly because researchers lacked laboratory models that accurately represented joint tissue affected by the disease. “Growing up with JIA was a little bit scary,” Jiang said in an interview with Science News Explores. “I didn’t know anyone else who had it. Her friends and family didn’t know any more about JIA than she did. But now, she is on a mission to demystify the disease.” To build a useful laboratory model, Jiang focused on fibroblast-like synoviocytes (FLS). These specialised cells line the joints and play an important role in inflammation and joint damage in people with arthritis. Working in her school laboratory during lunch breaks and weekends, Jiang used SW982, a human cell line commonly used to study adult rheumatoid arthritis. She then treated the cells with bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4), a signalling protein strongly linked to joint damage in children with JIA.

Laboratory findings and potential therapeutic uses

Jiang’s experiments showed that SW982 cells treated with BMP4 changed their behaviour. Their growth patterns and gene activity began to resemble those seen in actual JIA synovial tissue. “She treated SW982 cells with bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4), a protein linked to JIA-related joint damage,” Society for Science said in Jiang’s official project profile. “She found that cells treated with BMP4 behaved like JIA FLS in their growth patterns and gene expression.” By reproducing these features in the laboratory, Jiang’s model could give researchers a practical way to test potential medicines, study cellular pathways and examine treatments without depending only on limited tissue samples from children with the disease. In her interview with Science News Explores, Jiang described the long hours she spent analysing complex cell data while keeping up with schoolwork. “I never pull all-nighters, but I definitely was [going to sleep] later and later trying to figure out and analyze this data,” Jiang told Science News Explores. “Ever since I was in seventh grade, I became really interested in using science … to help in some way contribute to JIA treatment. So while the long hours were difficult, I wouldn’t have it any other way, because I always knew I wanted to do this.”

Recognition at America’s oldest science competition

The Regeneron Science Talent Search was established in 1942 and is the oldest and one of the most prestigious high school science and mathematics competitions in the United States. Finalists are judged by panels of leading scientists on the quality of their research, independent problem-solving skills and potential for future scientific leadership. Alongside her research, Jiang is an accomplished pianist who studies at the Manhattan School of Music precollege programme. She is also the head delegate of her school’s Model United Nations team and volunteers as an intern in a paediatric intensive care unit. Jiang hopes her work will encourage more open conversations about childhood chronic illnesses while helping researchers develop more targeted treatments. “Adding to the scientific knowledge about an illness that affects her personally is honestly one of the greatest accomplishments I could ever have imagined,” Jiang told Science News Explores. “Research has really contributed to my self-confidence and being okay with talking about my diagnosis.”