Pause for a moment and think back on how you spent your days when you were 15 years old. Most of us would still be carefree, but for Jack Andraka, he has achieved something that even adults who have strived for years have failed to do – by successfully developing a pancreatic cancer detection method that is not only fast and fairly accurate, but dirt cheap as well. We are talking about just 3 cents per test here, folks! Jack’s first brush with pancreatic cancer happened two years ago when a close family friend died. Jack was shaken up by the death, and started to learn up as much as he could about the disease via online means. Jack was not ready to accept the outdated detection method for pancreatic cancer and decided to work on a solution of his own.
At least Johns Hopkins University took a look at his submission (with nearly 200 rejections) and decided to work alongside the teen. It took 7 months of hard work for Andraka’s new test for pancreatic cancer was completed, and boy were the results well worth it! Apparently, Andraka’s method proved to be 168 times faster compared to previous tests, not to mention being so sensitive that it is also 400 times more effective when it comes to an accurate diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. There is also optimism going around that this could be useful in testing for different kinds of cancer as well as HIV.
Filed in . Read more about Cancer.