Students win HTX award for pushing past research setbacks

Aneesh was inspired by his internship at A*STAR in 2024 to start an ambitious project to combine tumour images, genomic and clinical patient data to help predict whether patients will respond to immunotherapy, a treatment that helps the immune system fight cancer.

He said current diagnostic methods are not sufficiently accurate in predicting which patients would respond well to immunotherapy.

He was also moved by what patients told him when he was volunteering at a hospice.

“They’re not very confident about the decisions that they make when they choose their treatments. It’s a very large burden for them to bear.”

When Aneesh and his team encountered their roadblock, they initially suspected a problem with how they were training the model.

After consulting their mentors, they realised that the older dataset lacked information the model needed, including certain gene data and patients’ past treatments.

They decided to shift towards newer Asian datasets.

Fortunately, Aneesh had earlier built up an international network of mentors and other young people who could advise the team and connect the team with hospitals and researchers in their respective countries.

It took the team around three months to find Asian datasets and start training the model on them.

Aneesh said: “I felt that the problem was worth solving, and a setback in our approach was not a sufficient reason to abandon it. Even though our initial idea wasn’t working, at least we were able to find out what went wrong, and then try to find a new direction.”

Nearly two years into the project, he sees no fixed end point, preferring to focus on the next step. He is now confirming beta-testing partnerships with some hospitals and cancer centres in South-east Asia.

The aspiring medical student hopes to eventually develop a model reliable enough to be used in hospitals here to help guide treatment decisions.

Can chicken bones help remove dye pollutants?

Another recipient of the award, Shavonne Tok, a JC2 student at Nanyang Junior College, encountered a different set of problems while investigating whether discarded chicken bones can trap and remove dyes from water.

She had wanted to tackle waste and water pollution. Textile dyes from factories can enter water bodies through improper disposal, she explained.

The year-long project, undertaken with a partner through the NUS Science Research Programme, involved scraping tissue off bones to prevent mould. But some bones still developed mould during storage.

Collecting and cleaning the bones was difficult, she said. To obtain more material for larger experiments, the pair bought frozen chicken feet to cook and harvest the bones. That also meant eating the chicken feet, which Tok does not like.

The pair also had to adjust their approach along the way.

Initially, they expected heating to make the bones more porous and improve dye removal, but the heated bones performed worse. Examining the bones under a microscope, they found that heating appeared to cause the bones’ porous structure to collapse, Tok said.

So they dropped the heat treatment, simplifying the preparation process, she said.

The pair also tested whether the bones could be used to remove silicon nanoparticles from water, but this yielded no results after two months.

Tok said they then decided to focus on just dyes. Negative results could still inform other researchers, she added.

The experience has changed how Tok views failure.

“In school, when you look at bad grades or failing, it’s like a dead end. But when you think about research and failures, the data is pointing you towards the solution to the puzzle.”