Brandon Mashandudze, a 14-year-old Grade 9 learner at Curro Mahikeng in the North West, has been named an American Lung Cancer Scholar for a research proposal on using artificial intelligence to detect lung cancer earlier.
He earned the title through the Lung Cancer Innovation Challenge, an international competition for middle and high school students run by the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative. His certificate is signed by Dr Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang, a thoracic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School.
Insights on Brandon Mashandudze's lung cancer research
His proposal looked at how AI and digital health tools could improve lung cancer prevention, early detection and personalised risk assessment. It is a research proposal rather than a finished diagnostic product, and he spent months on it, reading up on oncology, epidemiology, machine learning and statistics and revising it over several rounds.
"At some point, it stopped feeling like a normal school project and felt more like I was actually investigating a question," he said. He is clear about what AI should do in medicine: "AI isn't here to replace doctors. It can be a tool to help doctors look at information and possibly identify things earlier." His physical science teacher, Tshireletso Pitso, mentored him through the work.
Entries in the challenge were judged on innovation, impact, subject knowledge and scalability, and the first edition drew more than 1,000 students from around the world. Mashandudze plans to keep going by expanding his data and refining his approach. The topic matters here.
The Cancer Association of South Africa says lung cancer is among the five most common cancers in the country, affecting about 1 in 123 men and 1 in 277 women, and Discovery's research shows only 13% of people diagnosed survive five years, the lowest rate of the common cancers, largely because it is often found late.
What others are saying about Brandon Mashandudze's lung cancer research
MyBroadband reported the honour from a Curro statement, quoting Curro Mahikeng executive head Janita Maritz, who said the school was incredibly proud to see his work recognised on an international stage. The American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative describes the challenge as a way for students to learn about and advance lung cancer screening, and lists its overall winners. OncoDaily reported that the challenge's judges included lung cancer survivors, patient advocates, industry leaders and physicians.
Research skills, learned early
The real news is that a Grade 9 learner in Mahikeng worked through the kind of reading, analysis and revision normally expected of a university student, with a teacher backing him, and held his own against more than 1,000 entrants worldwide. That is worth celebrating on its own terms. Skills like framing a research question, working with data and taking criticism through several drafts transfer to any field.
"I want other young people to know that they don't need to wait until they're older to start researching something that interests them,” he says.
For his idea to become a working tool, it would need large amounts of medical data from South African patients and clinical testing, the same gap UCT's new Google-funded project is working to close for medicines.
You might also like our piece on Cape Town hosting the World Robot Olympiad, the Injini AI for Education programme, and the first AI-assisted brain tumour operation.
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