Published: 20 September 2026
Doctoral candidate Clarice Sabino has received 1st Prize in the Senior category of the 2026 International Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research-Southeast Asia (IADR-SEA) Hatton Divisional Competition for her research project, “Digital BioScore: Integrating Materials and Cells for AI-driven Biomaterials Design”.
Announced during the 40th IADR-SEA Annual Scientific Meeting hosted by the University of Puthisastra’s Faculty of Dentistry from 17–19 September 2026 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the IADR-SEA Division Hatton Awards provide opportunities for the best junior and senior investigators from the Southeast Asian Division to present their research at the annual IADR General Sessions and compete at the Global Hatton Competitions.
Developed at the faculty, Clarice’s project addresses a key challenge in biomaterials research: a dental material may perform well in one biological test but less favourably in another, making it challenging to assess and interpret its overall biological behaviour.
Digital BioScore offers a new way of bringing these different biological responses together. The approach integrates multiple responses of dental pulp stem cells — including cell proliferation, migration, and mineralisation — into a single digital representation. This resulting ‘hologram’ provides a visual biological fingerprint of how cells respond to different dental materials while retaining information from the individual biological outcomes.
Rather than evaluating a material based on a single biological test, Digital BioScore enables researchers to examine its biological response as a multidimensional profile. The structured biological data can also be incorporated into AI-assisted biomaterials research, supporting the comparison and design of materials based on the biological responses they are intended to promote.
The project was conducted under the supervision of Associate Professor Vinicius Rosa, NUS Dentistry’s Research Lead for Novel Diagnostics and Therapeutics.
Congratulations to Clarice on this outstanding achievement and recognition of her research!
