When Jack Andraka tells us how to create a detection sensor for pancreatic cancer it sounds simple. Start with water, pour in nanotubes, add antibodies, mix together, dip strips of paper in, dry them, and you can detect cancer.
The sensor has a very high accuracy rate, detects cancer in the early stages when a patient has the highest survival rate, and can be produced for an astonishing three cents. Jack's overall aim is to raise the rate of pancreatic cancer survival from five percent to a level closer to one hundred percent.
Andraka's journey began when a close family friend died of pancreatic cancer. The loss hit Jack hard, and he began to do research online. He found that almost eighty percent of pancreatic cancer is diagnosed late, when the survival rate is around two percent. The current method of pancreatic cancer is sixty years old, or in teenager terms older than Jack's dad.
The test costs over eight hundred dollars per application to look for the cancer, and misses around thirty percent of all pancreatic cancer. As he says in this TEDTalk, your doctor would have to be extremely suspicious to order a pancreatic cancer test.
Through research Andraka found a database of eight thousand proteins that are present in pancreatic cancer patients, and he began to crunch the data together to find a common thread. Around the four thousandth try he found mesothelin, a protein that is present in high levels in pancreatic cancer patients in the early stages of the disease.
When Jack entered the design phase of his project he set out criteria for a detection method: the sensor would need to be inexpensive, rapid, simple, sensitive, selective and minimally invasive. The breakthrough idea came in biology class where Jack was half-heartedly learning about antibodies and fully engrossed in doing carbon nanotube research. A combination of the two could detect the cancer proteins.
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This TEDTalk is full of youthful exuberance and big personality. Jack has already won several awards, most notably the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and met President Obama. He appeared on the October 13 edition of 60 Minutes and is ready to take on the world one challenge at a time.