Losing a friend at the prime of her youth to ovarian cancer started Jessica Ooi Sui Ying on her journey into cancer diagnostics.

Jessica’s bold vision: a simple paper strip for early disease detection, no expensive machines needed. Her research proposal that won her the Merdeka Award Grant in 2021 took her to ETH Zürich, where she worked with global leaders in biosensors and point-of-care diagnostics.

Jessica developed a low-cost assay to detect miRNA-665, a biomarker linked to ovarian cancer. Unlike standard RT-PCR methods, her approach uses a simple color change, making early detection possible even in low-resource settings.

Jessica's work represented a promising step towards democratising early cancer detection.