Dubai teen built AI platform for breast cancer after losing grandmother at 10; took cancer awareness to India

At 10, Saiyette Aima could not understand the medical language around breast cancer. But its consequences were clear to her from the get-go. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Stage 3 disease after noticing a small, pimple-like mark on her neck, she began chemotherapy and radiation and the family quickly entered a period of treatment and uncertainty. While she was thousands of miles away from her grandmother in Delhi, the experience stayed with her. Now, cancer was no longer a disease she read about on paper, it was a part of her life. “I watched her go through chemotherapy and radiation and saw how cancer affected not just her health, but our entire family,” Saiyette told Khaleej Times.Her grandmother later died in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions made the event even harder for the family. “My parents, my sister and I were the only people in our family that lived here in Dubai. The rest of my family lived with her in Delhi,” she said.Beginning of an effortA few years later, the Dubai College student cut her locks and donated them through Locks of Hope, a Friends of Cancer Patients programme that provides wigs for people undergoing chemotherapy. “Hair lo...