Name: 【TED】Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager (A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager | Jack Andraka)
Uploaded: 2017-06-19T05:24:15.000Z
Duration: 10 min 50 s
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Have you ever experienced a moment in your life

Adverbs of degree

was learn as much as you could to make sense of it all?

When I was 13, a close family friend who was like an uncle to me

Using the Internet, I found a variety of statistics on pancreatic cancer,

Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late,

when someone has less than a two percent chance of survival.

Why are we so bad at detecting pancreatic cancer?

Today's current "modern" medicine is a 60-year-old technique.

But also, it's extremely expensive, costing 800 dollars per test,

and it's grossly inaccurate, missing 30 percent of all pancreatic cancers.

Your doctor would have to be ridiculously suspicious that you have the cancer

Learning this, I knew there had to be a better way.

as to what a sensor would have to look like

in order to effectively diagnose pancreatic cancer.

Now, there's a reason why this test hasn't been updated in over six decades.

And that's because when we're looking for pancreatic cancer,

which is already abundant in all these tons and tons of protein,

and you're looking for this miniscule difference in this tiny amount of protein.

However, undeterred due to my teenage optimism --

I went online to a teenager's two best friends, Google and Wikipedia.

I got everything for my homework from those two sources.

that listed a database of over 8,000 different proteins

that are found when you have pancreatic cancer.

So, I decided to go and make it my new mission

and see which ones could serve as a bio-marker for pancreatic cancer.

I decided to map out scientific criteria, and here it is.

Essentially, first, the protein would have to be found in all pancreatic cancers,

in the earliest stages, but also only in cancer.

And so I'm just plugging and chugging through this gargantuan task,

And the name of the protein I'd located was called mesothelin,

and it's just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill type protein,

unless, of course, you have pancreatic, ovarian or lung cancer,

in which case it's found at these very high levels in your bloodstream.

But also, the key is that it's found in the earliest stages of the disease,

when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival.

So now that I'd found a reliable protein I could detect,

I then shifted my focus to actually detecting that protein,

Now, my breakthrough came in a very unlikely place,

possibly the most unlikely place for innovation --

my high school biology class, the absolute stifler of innovation.

And I had snuck in this article on these things called carbon nanotubes,

and that's just a long, thin pipe of carbon

that's an atom thick, and one 50,000th the diameter of your hair.

They're kind of like the superheroes of material science.

And while I was sneakily reading this article under my desk in my biology class,

we were supposed to be paying attention to these other kind of cool molecules,

And these are pretty cool because they only react

but they're not nearly as interesting as carbon nanotubes.

And so then, I was sitting in class, and suddenly it hit me:

I could combine what I was reading about, carbon nanotubes,

with what I was supposed to be thinking about, antibodies.

Essentially, I could weave a bunch of these antibodies

such that you have a network that only reacts with one protein,

but also, due to the properties of these nanotubes,

it will change its electrical properties,

These networks of carbon nanotubes are extremely flimsy.

And since they're so delicate, they need to be supported.

Making a cancer sensor out of paper is about as simple

as making chocolate chip cookies, which I love.

You start with some water, pour in some nanotubes,

【TED】Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager (A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager | Jack Andraka)

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【TED】Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager (A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager | Jack Andraka)

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