Reading cancer in the gut

The achievement

Ananya Ganapathy, a student of The International School Bangalore, works where computing meets biology. In May 2025, her project — “A Prediction Model for Detecting Colorectal Cancer and Identifying Biomarkers From the Gut Microbiome” — won a Fourth Award in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in Columbus, Ohio, verified on the Society for Science’s official awards list.

The project

Her research uses machine learning to search the gut microbiome — the community of microbes living in the human digestive system — for patterns that could reveal colorectal cancer early, without invasive tests. Her research summary names the classifiers she trains — Random Forest, XGBoost and neural networks — on microbiome data from patients and healthy samples, looking for microbial genera whose presence tracks the disease.

The work pays particular attention to India and other developing countries, where microbiome data has been scarce, and it began during a research internship at IIT Madras. Her website also records a Grand Award at India’s IRIS National Fair 2025 and a second study, on predicting survival in an aggressive blood cancer; alongside research she founded Double Helix, a school magazine on computational biology, and writes a monthly column on technology for The Hindu.