Times Live – AFP, 28 February, 2013
Jack Andraka catapulted from being a typical US teenager unaware of the pancreas to one with a cheap way to detect cancer in the organ before it turns deadly.
Jack Andraka speaking at TED, (Image by: TEDxTalks/ YouTube) |
Jack Andraka catapulted from being a typical US teenager unaware of the pancreas to one with a cheap way to detect cancer in the organ before it turns deadly.
"Through
the Internet, anything is possible," Andraka said while telling the story
of his screening breakthrough at a prestigious TED Conference in Southern
California on Wednesday.
"There
is so much more to it than posting duck-face pictures of yourself online,"
he continued, sucking in his cheeks and pushing out his lips to playfully
underscore his point.
"If a
15-year-old who didn't know what a pancreas was could figure out a way to
detect pancreatic cancer, imagine what you could do."
Andraka,
who turned 16 in January, recounted how three years ago he began scouring the
Internet for information about pancreatic cancer after it killed a cherished
family friend.
He told of
being shocked to learn that the cancer was typically found too late to save
people. On top of that, the test used to screen for the illness was 60 years
old, he said.
"That
is older than my dad," Andraka quipped. "More important, it is
expensive, inaccurate, and your doctor would have to be ridiculously suspicious
that you had the cancer to give you this test."
He figured
what was needed was a test that was inexpensive, fast, simple and sensitive.
"Undeterred
due to my teenage optimism, I went online to a teenager's two best friends:
Google and Wikipedia," Andraka said.
What he
found was there were thousands of proteins that could be detected in the blood
of people with pancreatic cancer, and he hunted for one that could serve as an
early flag for the illness.
"Finally,
on the 4,000th try when I am losing my sanity, I found the protein,"
Andraka said.
The
revelation came in what he described as an unlikely place, a high school
biology class he referred to as an "absolute stifler of innovation."
"I was
sneakily reading this nanotubes article under my desk while we were supposed to
be paying attention to antibodies," Andraka recalled.
"Suddenly
it hit me that I could combine what I was reading with what I was supposed to
be thinking about."
He
described a recipe for making paper sensors to detect the protein -mesothelin -
in blood that is "about as simple as making chocolate chip cookies, which
I love."
The test
costs three cents, takes minutes, and appears to be 100 percent accurate,
according to his TED Talk.
Andraka
said he sent out 200 requests to scientists for lab space to continue his work,
only to be rejected by all but Johns Hopkins University where he was fiercely
grilled before being taken in.
He
commenced to fix holes he discovered in his "once brilliant
procedure" and went on to be awarded the 2012 Intel International Science
and Engineering Fair grand prize.
Andraka
described his approach as having the potential to be tailored to screen for
other forms of cancer as well as heart disease or HIV/AIDS.
He told of
currently working on "something the size of a cube of sugar" that
could "look through your skin" and study blood or signs of almost any
disease. The cost? An estimated five dollars.
Related Article:
No comments:
Post a Comment