Last month, 17-year-old Brittany Wenger of Sarasota, Fla. reportedly created a computer brain that can diagnose breast cancer with 99 percent sensitivity to cancer cells, winning a $50,000 scholarship from Google.
And now 15-year-old high school student Jack Andraka has created a pancreatic cancer test that is “168 times faster and more than 1,000 times less expensive than the gold standard in the field,” according to a story at tikki.visibli.com. He has applied for a patent for his test and is now carrying out further research at Johns Hopkins University in the Baltimore area.
And for those of you out there rueing all the time our kids spend online, he reportedly did it by using Google, the story noted.
The test detects an abnormal protein found in the blood that indicates pancreatic cancer, according to Dr. Anirban Maitra, professor of pathology, oncology and chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was interviewed by CBS affiliate WJZ-13.
The Maryland native netted $75,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May for his creation, and the story reported that he said, if you can believe it, that search engines and free online science papers were the tools that allowed him to create the test.
And all the test requires is a simple blood or urine sample.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the toughest to diagnose and treat, as it’s most often found in advanced stages. About 43,920 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year and approximately 37,390 people will die of it.
Since 2004, rates of pancreatic cancer have increased about 1.5 percent per year.
Andraka has also created tests for lung cancer and ovarian cancer that can detect them in their earliest stages, providing up to a 50-percent chance of successful treatment for these cancers that routinely kill most of those found to have it.
Just what’s in those high school water fountains?
Edited by
Braden Becker
