20 April 2017
Singaporean teenage student Catherine Lai has gained a promising headstart in the search for drugs that can successfully fight the multidrug-resistant superbug Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia in human beings.
She developed a software platform using bioinformatic protocols to screen for compounds that can combat the specific enzymes which allow the pneumonia bacteria to survive in humans.
Her research made her a finalist in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search, an American-based competition. The alumni of the competition, which dates back to 1942, have frequently gone on to win many distinguished honours later in life, including 12 Nobel Prizes for the sciences.
Catherine has also identified a set of disregulated genes linked to nasopharyngeal cancer. The results were published in the scientific journal Computers In Biology And Medicine.