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A 17-year-old high school student from North Carolina has won the 2008 Intel Science Talent Search for developing a genetic method that predicts the likelihood of relapse in early-stage colon cancer patients.

Intel awarded Shivani Sud a $100,000 college scholarship for her work in labs at Temple University and the National Cancer Institute. Sud has been pursuing her interest in cancer research since her early teens; when The Scientist profiled her in 2006, she had already worked on projects developing new cancer drug delivery vectors and studying the downregulation of proteins involved with apoptosis.

Sud's prize-winning "50-gene model," which uses gene expression to molecularly characterize colon tumor types, improves upon current visual tumor identification methods and could one day be used to tailor drug treatments to individual patients based on the state of their tumors.