TAIMUN 12th Press 2014

 

     Jack Andraka is a high school sophomore at the North County High School, and an inventor, scientist, and cancer researcher. Impressively, also the recipient of the 2012 Gordon E. Moore Award, the grand prize of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Andraka was awarded for his work in developing a rapid and inexpensive method to detect an increase of a protein that indicates the presence of pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer during early stages when there is a better survival rate with current treatments.

 

     Andraka was born in Crownsville, Maryland. Jack's father, Steve Andraka, is a civil engineer. His mother, Jane Andraka, is an anesthetist. She told the Sun "... we're not a super-athletic family. We don't go to much football or baseball." "Instead we have a million [science] magazines [and] sit around the table and talk about how people came up with their ideas and what we would do differently." Andraka was inspired to work in pancreatic cancer when a close family friend died from the disease. While looking into the background of pancreatic cancer, he discovered that a reason for the poor survival rate was the lack of early detection and a rapid, sensitive, inexpensive screening method.

 

     "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 searched for one that could serve as an early flag for the illness.

 

     "Finally, on the 4000th try when I am losing my sanity, I found the protein," Andraka said.

 

     In an interview with the BBC, Andraka claims that the idea behind his pancreatic test hit him while he was in biology class studying antibodies and reading an article on analytical methods using carbon nanotubes. Afterwards, he followed up with more research via Google on nanotubes and cancer biochemistry, aided by free online scientific journals.

 

     He then contacted 200 professors at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health with a plan, a budget, and a timeline for his project, in the hopes of receiving laboratory help. He received 199 rejection emails before Anirban Maitra, Professor of Pathology, Oncology, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine replied with an affirmative.

 

     The product of his project is a new dipstick type diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer using a novel paper sensor, similar to that of a diabetic test strip. The strip tests for the level of mesothelin to determine whether or not a patient has pancreatic cancer. Mesothelin is a soluble cancer biomarker first described by Scholler and colleagues in 1999. According to Andraka, the test is 168 times faster, 1/26,000 times less expensive (costing about three cents), and 400 times more sensitive than previous diagnostic tests. It also has the added benefit of only need five minutes to run. Due to the common mesothelin biomarker, the test is also effective for detecting ovarian and lung cancer. However, any practical usefulness of the test remains to be seen, according to Susan Desmond-Hellmann, oncologist and chancellor of UCSF. Much more testing, possibly over several years, is needed to demonstrate that the test can catch cases early and reliably enough.

 

     "Through the Internet, anything is possible," Andraka said while telling the story of his screening breakthrough at a prestigious TED Conference in Southern California. "There is so much more to it than posting duck-face pictures of yourself online.