At 17, Iris Shen — a student based in The Woodlands, Texas — took third place and a $150,000 prize at the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search, where her work on blood-cancer detection drew attention for the distinctiveness of its methodology. Bypassing standard laboratory models entirely, Shen put a candidate blood-cancer compound through trials in clams to assess whether the molluscs could function as a viable platform for that category of drug research.
Findings from the Society for Science and Regeneron indicate that the compound triggered a response in the molluscs comparable to what researchers had documented in human cells, while a separate combination of candidate cancer therapies held back tumour development within the clams. Bridging marine biology, cancer research, and pharmaceutical testing, her body of work opens a path toward faster, more streamlined treatment screening.
Judges of the prize pointed to two distinct qualities in the submission: a set of findings that showed measurable promise, and a line of inquiry that few researchers had thought to pursue — namely, whether an atypical organism might hold answers to a pressing problem in medicine.
Shen's research centred on a problem that has long stalled progress in oncology: the absence of reliable laboratory models leaves no established method for vetting potential treatments before human trials can be considered. Studying blood cancers — diseases rooted in blood cells and bone marrow — presents researchers with particular challenges, given that the underlying biology operates differently from that of solid tumours.
Leukemia-like cancers that take hold in clams drew Shen's attention as a potential living platform for evaluating treatments. Researchers generally hold that a useful model need not physically resemble the organism under study — what matters is whether it replicates enough of the relevant biological processes to generate findings worth acting on.
When Shen's team exposed the clam model to a potential blood-cancer treatment, its reaction mirrored patterns documented in human cell studies, pointing to a possible role for these molluscs in evaluating such therapies. Pending broader validation, clam-derived models hold potential as an early-stage screening instrument — one that researchers could deploy to narrow down drug prospects before resource-intensive trials begin.
Testing a broader panel of candidate compounds, Shen found that pairing certain agents together held back tumour development in the clams. Those findings point to the model's potential value not just for examining single drugs in isolation, but for probing how therapies interact when administered in combination. Paired therapies have drawn growing attention in oncology precisely because any single treatment can lose its effectiveness as tumour cells adapt over time.
Shen's work points to clams as a potentially useful organism for probing those unresolved questions. At this stage, the work represents an early proof of concept, stopping well short of establishing that clams could substitute for human trials or that the drug combination has cleared the bar for patient use.
A condition called disseminated neoplasia allows malignant cells to travel through a clam's bloodstream, making the disease transmissible between animals. Parallels with certain blood cancer characteristics have drawn growing scientific attention toward these shellfish as a model for examining how malignant cells persist, migrate, and respond to treatment. Harnessing that naturally occurring phenomenon as a practical foundation for drug discovery became the central problem Shen directed her research toward.
Founded in 1942, the Regeneron Science Talent Search draws high school seniors from across the United States into a national competition covering science and mathematics — one that many in the field regard as the country's longest-running contest of its kind at that level. Of the 2,600-plus entries submitted that year, a panel whittled the pool down to 40 finalists, each of whom travelled to Washington, D.C., to present their independent research.
A third-place finish in the competition brought Shen a prize of $150,000 tied to her research work. According to the Society for Science, top honours and a $250,000 prize went to Connor Hill, a Pennsylvania entrant whose research explored noble polyhedra, with Edward Kang of New Jersey earning the runner-up position and $175,000 through an artificial intelligence tool designed to screen retinal data in connection with autism and ADHD studies.
Distributed across 40 finalists, prize money from the 2026 competition exceeded $1.8 million, while the broader Regeneron funding pool — once support for top scholars and their schools is factored in — climbed to $3.1 million in all. Thousands of early-career researchers have earned recognition through the programme in the years following Regeneron's arrival as title sponsor in 2017, and those who passed through it have gone on to collect Nobel Prizes, MacArthur Fellowships, and the National Medal of Science.
