Half a year into building an artificial intelligence model to help doctors select suitable patients for cancer treatment immunotherapy, student Aneesh Bondugula faced a setback that made him rethink the project.
His team’s model, trained on patient data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, performed well when tested against other data from the same repository. But its accuracy dropped when tested against a separate Asian dataset, said the 18-year-old.
“The first thing I felt was panic,” said Aneesh, a Year 6 student at NUS High School of Mathematics and Science. “It was a lot of work that we had done during those six months.”
As the team changed direction, members left. At several points, he considered dropping the project.
But he pushed on.
His perseverance has earned him recognition as one of five recipients of the first Undaunted Student Award by the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX). The award recognises students who persist through setbacks in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) projects.
The first such award involved three partner schools and drew 14 applications. Recipients receive a S$4,000 cash prize each and opportunities to participate in HTX’s internship programme.
The Undaunted Award was created in 2023 to recognise unsuccessful initiatives by HTX staff, in the hope that these efforts would lead to successful projects that government agencies can use.
The Undaunted Student Award is a newer extension of this initiative, aimed at recognising students who demonstrate similar perseverance.
HTX, a statutory board under the Ministry of Home Affairs, develops science and technology solutions for public safety and security.
The agency’s human resources director Lim Puay Sze said the agency was already engaging STEM students through career fairs and wanted to share its values with them, particularly the willingness to persevere through failure in research.
To do so, HTX rolled out the competition with NUS High School of Mathematics and Science, Nanyang Junior College and the School of Science and Technology, Singapore.
Ms Lim said the judging placed emphasis on “failing forward” – the lessons students learnt from setbacks and how these informed their next steps.
The agency hopes that sharing such experiences will normalise conversations about failure and build resilience among students. It plans to extend the annual award to more schools.
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. THE STRAITS TIMES
