Name: 【TEDx】Inventing a Low-Cost Test for Cancer at Age 15: Jack Andraka at TEDxMidAtlantic 2012
Uploaded: 2014-05-02T09:49:22.000Z
Duration: 10 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Earlier this year, I won an International Science Fair.

Ever since then, a bunch of people have been asking me,

Modal verbs - B1

"How on earth could a 15 year old have developed a new way

A year and half of hard work and over millions, millions of failures.

Recently, I developed a novel paper sensor

for the detection of pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer.

The sensor -- what's so cool about [it] is it is 168 times faster,

over 26,000 times less expensive and over 400 times more sensitive

The best part, it costs 3 cents and takes 5 minutes to run.

It all began one day when I was researching

online statistics about pancreatic cancer.

"Why on earth would a 15 year old be interested in pancreatic cancer?

Shouldn't he be interested in video games?"

a close family friend who's like an uncle to me, had passed of the disease.

What I found on the Internet was eye-boggling.

What I found was 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late,

when someone has less than 2 percent chance of survival.

The average survival time is about 3 months.

So, there is demographic of about how 2 percent of people will survive.

Now, I was wondering why are we so bad at detecting pancreatic cancer?

should have already been able to detect this long ago.

What I found is that our "modern medicine" is a 60 year old technique.

It misses over 30 percent of all pancreatic cancers.

It costs over 800 dollars and it is not covered by insurance plan.

So, it's not an option to lower income patients.

because pancreatic cancer is, what we call, non symptomatic disease.

Usually, they are just like really random symptoms like abdominal pain.

Who doesn't have abdominal pain sometimes.

I thought there has to be a better way than this really crappy technique.

I started to setting up the scientific criteria,

"How was I going to detect pancreatic cancer?",

What I said, is it would have to be  inexpensive, rapid, simple,

sensitive, non-invasive, and also selective.

I began to realize why we haven't been able to detect pancreatic cancer.

What I found is that -- What you are doing is you are looking for

this tiny biomarker of protein that is found in your blood stream.

And, that sounds very straightforward, but it's anything but.

The problem is that, your blood, it is already abundant in proteins.

You have liters and liters of it in your body.

So, find this tiny increase in this tiny amount of protein in there

what you are trying to do is kind of like find a needle in a haystack.

Only worse, it is trying to find a needle in the stack of nearly identical needles.

From there, what I did is I began looking at my search online

because what other source does a 15 year old kid have.

I actually started with a database of over 8,000 different proteins.

And, luckily, on the 4,000th try and I hit gold.

The protein I found was called mesothelin.

It is essentially your ordinary run of the mill protein

unless you have pancreatic, ovarian, or lung cancer.

In which case, it's found these extremely high levels in your blood stream.

Then, the key here is that this protein is found in the earliest stages of the disease

when you have close to a 100% chance of survival.

So, if you could detect this, you would barely have to worry about the cancer, then.

how I was actually going to detect this protein.

What I did is I kind of smuggled in this scientific article

on these really cool things called carbon nanotubes.

It was like under my jacket and I was reading it under my desk.

A carbon nanotube, you might wonder, what on earth is that?

It's essentially is a long thin pipe of carbon.

It is one 150th of the diameter of your hair and it is an atom thick.

But, it has extremely amazing properties.

That's like the super hero of material science.

Now, just as we were learning about -- or I was learning about these --

while I was reading the paper and the amazing properties,

we were learning about this things called antibodies.

An antibodies are these super cool organic molecules.

They basically attach to one protein and only that protein.