Congratulations to Casuarine Low for receiving the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Prize AY2013/14! The OURP is an annual university-wide competition to encourage research and to recognise the best undergraduate researchers in NUS. Casuarine was an attachment student at Dr Edward Chow’s lab and has just graduated from the university.

Title: “Nanodiamond Drug Delivery Approach for Effective Treatment of Chemoresistant Hepatic Cancer Stem Cells”

Abstract: This project showcased the potential of Nanodiamonds (ND) as a drug delivery for treatment of hepatic cancers, which otherwise has a bad prognosis and high relapse rate, due to chemoresistant cancer stem cells. We were able to show the use of chemotherapeutics conjugated upon nanodiamonds as an effective tool to overcome said resistance with much higher efficacy and minimize the probability of cancer recurrence. While the lab has previously shown that ND drug delivery can overcome chemoresistance in cancer, this project is the first to demonstrate that ND drug delivery can effectively kill tumor-initiaing cancer stem cells better than treatment with standard unmodified chemotherapeutics. The exciting results of this project has cumulated into a pending publication.