Skip to main content

While you were watching cat videos, this 15-year-old invented a pancreatic cancer detection sensor

Image used with permission by copyright holder

What were you doing when you were 15 years old? Strolling the mall? LOL-ing on a chat client with your best friends whom you just saw 30 minutes ago when you left school? Don’t be embarrassed, we all have those typical, unimportant childhood moments that we occasionally long for. But for 15-year-old Jack Andraka, being a teen isn’t just about rolling with friends and trying to get good grades for the parents: He’s gone and invented a sensor that could detect early stage pancreatic cancer – a process which could bump patient survival rate “close to 100 percent.”

Recently honored with Intel’s Gordon E. Moore Award at the company’s annual Science and Engineering Fair, Andraka developed a dip-stick sensor that tests patients for levels of mesothelin, a biomarker found in blood and urine used to detect early stage pancreatic cancer. The sensor costs approximately three cents to make, and could arm patients with the most cost-efficient and effective way to test for early stages of the disease before it quickly grows into its final stages. In comparison, current methods of pancreatic cancer detection can only uncover its presence after the cancer’s made its way through the patient’s system. Because of this, pancreatic cancer patients have low survival rates; on average, 20 percent of patients manage a one-year survival rate while five-year rates stand at a woeful four percent.

“Essentially what I’m envisioning here is that this could be on your shelf at your Walgreens, your Kmart,” Andraka tells TakePart. “Let’s say you suspect you have a condition … you buy the test for that. And you can see immediately if you have it. Instead of your doctor being the doctor, you’re the doctor.”

The dip-stick sensors can also be altered to check for other biomarkers, meaning the low-cost device could go on to test for various types of diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, other forms of cancer, or environmental contaminants such as E. Coli and salmonella. Andraka is currently in talks with major medical companies such as LabCorp and QuestDiagnostics to bring his sensor kit to the masses. This, of course, after he’d been rejected by nearly 200 doctors who claimed his invention would never work. It was only until Andraka piqued the interest of one Dr. Anirban Maitra at John Hopkins University who confirmed the sensor as a successful device.

“He’s ahead of his time in many ways,” Maitra tells Smithsonian Magazine. “Taking one idea and seeing how to extrapolate something even more expansive, that’s the difference between being great and being a genius.”

A well-deserved congratulations obviously goes out to the young man, who developed something that could change the course of medicine before he’s legally allowed to drive. But before you get too upset, just remember that Andraka is also still your typical teen: According to BBC, he likes to kayak, watch “Glee,” and search for random musings on Google. Meanwhile, we’re just gonna sink back in our seats, cry about our worthless lives, and pwn some noobs at Halo.

Natt Garun
Former Digital Trends Contributor
An avid gadgets and Internet culture enthusiast, Natt Garun spends her days bringing you the funniest, coolest, and strangest…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more