Indian American Students Win At Regeneron Fair

Photo: Chris Ayers Photography/Society for Science

India-West News Desk

WASHINGTON, D.C.– Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Society for Science announced that Saathvik Kannan, 17, of Columbia, Missouri, received one of two Regeneron Young Scientist Awards of $50,000. The Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair is the world’s largest global pre-college science and engineering competition.

Kannan won for using biocomputational methods to understand the causes of heightened infectivity in the disease mpox after it reemerged in 2022. Saathvik’s approach, named Bioplex, uses a combination of machine learning and three-dimensional comparative protein modeling to decode structures like those that enable the mpox virus to replicate.

This allowed him to identify the mutations in the virus that likely made it more infectious as well as other mutations that could make it resistant to antibiotics. Saathvik believes scientists will also be able to apply Bioplex to future outbreaks of other viruses, a press release said.

Kaitlyn Wang, 17, of San José, CA, won the $75,000 top award for a project that explored planets that orbit very close around their suns.

Rishabh Ranjan, 17, and Gopalaniruddh Tadinada, 17, of Louisville, Kentucky, received the H. Robert Horvitz Prize for Fundamental Research of $10,000 for building a custom, automated system to detect gastrointestinal cancer before serious symptoms appear. The team’s system combines robotics and machine learning to analyze blood samples to identify healthy patients, as well as those with pancreatic, colorectal or hepatic cancers, in only three hours at an estimated cost of only $300. Detecting these cancers before they metastasize could make treatment much simpler and more effective.