How these PhD holders apply grad school experience to improve healthcare in S'pore

In today's healthcare landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the way doctors and nurses work by reducing their workload and streamlining care delivery – a transformation that Dr Yong Zixin, a Duke-NUS PhD graduate, is committed to driving forward.

Currently leading the development of AI solutions at a start-up called OutcomesAI, Dr Yong, along with his team, is building artificial medical intelligence, a type of AI that can be used in the healthcare industry at the patient care level.

“When doctors or nurses manage patients, there is a lot of talking, writing of notes and information analysis – pulling everything together. It is a matter of looking at which parts can be done by AI,” he says.

By taking on administrative duties, the AI tool frees up healthcare professionals’ time so that they can focus on patients and more complex needs, improving both job efficiency and the patient experience. 

For Dr Yong, who went directly from a BSc (Honours) in Physics at NUS to the PhD programme in Integrated Biology and Medicine at Duke-NUS, it was during his PhD studies that he came to appreciate the value and importance of translational research in making an impact on people's lives.

“What we did at the undergraduate level was pretty basic and it was mostly coursework. Research is something really different where you explore and study things that nobody really has an answer to,” he says.

He says Duke-NUS gave him the freedom to pursue experiments driven by his curiosity, supported by the school’s world-class faculty and facilities. 

His interactions with his MD-PhD clinician-scientist colleagues inspired him to take on research with real-world application.

Dr Yong worked with experts at Duke-NUS' Neuroscience and Behavioural Disorders Signature Research Programme and SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre to design and carry out experiments that analysed the brain activity of patients in a vegetative state post-brain trauma. The goal was to determine if these patients showed signs of consciousness when spoken to. The research was accelerated by the support of the SingHealth and Duke-NUS Neuroscience Academic Clinical Programme.

"We used magnetic resonance imaging to study how patients' brains react to external stimulations and see whether we can apply them to the actual world where we can see what's going on with these patients, asking if there was a possibility that we can better help them," says Dr Yong.

"I think Duke-NUS' overall culture – being around great researchers who were not afraid of breaking into new fields – really shaped students like myself."

Fellow Duke-NUS alumna Joanna Sinnakannu, too, is grateful to the school for giving her a solid foundation that enables her to contribute to the development of novel blood cancer treatments.

Dr Sinnakannu is the senior manager for partnerships and intellectual property (IP) at Medisix Therapeutics, a company that develops novel immune cell technologies, like CAR T cell therapies (a type of cancer immunotherapy) to overcome challenges doctors face in treating cancer and autoimmune diseases driven by T cells – white blood cells essential to the immune system’s response to infections and abnormal cells. Her role requires her to keep up with new technologies such as immunotherapy and personalised medicine that are reshaping the medical field.

"Although my background training was neither in immunology nor CAR T, my understanding of basic scientific concepts and technologies enabled me to transition to different areas than I have been trained in," she says.

In her current position, she liaises with company scientists, patent attorneys and senior management to manage Medisix's intellectual properties. 

"The work I do ensures that the company and our therapies are and continue to remain attractive to clinical collaborators, investors and potential licensees — all of whom are essential in bringing our therapies into the clinic and closer to patients,” she says.  

She credits her training and research at Duke-NUS for giving her the skills to understand and safeguard the intellectual property behind Medisix's cancer therapies.

"Having prior research and project management experience from my time at Duke-NUS not only enables me to pass along relevant scientific data to our patent attorneys, but also to discuss, develop and push through views on patent strategies with my colleagues to build and maintain a strong patent portfolio for the company," Dr Sinnakannu says.

At Duke-NUS, her PhD research looked at tackling resistance to a cancer treatment called imatinib, which is often used to treat a type of cancer called chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). 

Dr Sinnakannu found that the technical and soft skills she gained through her PhD allowed her to explore career options beyond research.

"After I left Duke-NUS, it was serendipitous that I got into a partnerships role that also exposed me to IP management at the R&D (research and development) agency A*Star," she says. Dr Sinnakannu later moved to Medisix to focus on managing its intellectual property.

She is now part of a team that is working to build and maintain patent protection over Medisix's cell therapy assets, including its most developed therapy for T cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Now in the first phase of clinical trials, the therapy targets and eliminates a specific subset of cells, including cancerous ones, by using CAR T cells that recognise a protein called CD7 on the cell surface, which acts as a “homing beacon”.

“Being part of the team delivering a breakthrough cancer treatment is one of my proudest career achievements,” says Dr Sinnakannu.

“Knowing that we’re offering hope to patients, especially children facing difficult diagnoses, brings me immense gratification as we work toward better outcomes and brighter futures for them.”