Stephanie Yeung awarded the Undergraduate Prize from the British Society of Oral Medicine
Stephanie Yeung, a fourth year BDS student, was recently awarded the Undergraduate Prize from the British Society of Oral Medicine.
She received her award at the British Society of Oral Medicine Winter Meeting for her presentation ‘A Digital Diagnostic Test for Oral Cancer’. The meeting was held in Liverpool on the 1st December, coinciding with World AIDS day. Focusing on oral medicine which lies at the interface between medicine and dentistry, the conference also included undergraduate and postgraduate presentations on original research.
Her presentation explored the work carried out for her intercalated BSc project. Supervised by Dr Muy-Teck Teh, Senior Lecturer in Head and Neck Cancer, her project focussed on validating a new protocol for the quantitative Malignancy Index Diagnostic System (qMIDS), a FOXM1 oncogene-based diagnostic test for quantifying oral squamous cell carcinoma.
qMIDS was developed by Dr Muy-Teck Teh and was launched in 2012 as the world’s first diagnostic test for the early detection of oral cancers. It has been validated on over 527 oral cancer patients from the UK, Norway, China, India and Pakistan, with over 90 per cent accuracy compared to conventional tests.
To achieve the prize award, Stephanie conducted an oral presentation followed by discussion with the specialist audience about her project. Other presentations ranged from case reports and clinical audit to translational research.
qMIDS is a reproducible, high-throughput and cost-effective test amenable to automation in the clinical workflow; in reducing the time required to obtain diagnostic results, it has the potential to revolutionise oral cancer diagnosis.