
15-Year-Old Maker Astronomically Improves Pancreatic Cancer Test - swombat
http://blog.makezine.com/2012/07/18/15-year-old-maker-astronomically-improves-pancreatic-cancer-test/
======
randomdrake
"I actually love single-walled carbon nanotubes; they're like the superheroes
of material science." I feel the same way. This kid is genuinely excited and
interested which, is extraordinary. I love seeing youngsters getting excited
about science.

Unfortunately, this blog post and the one it claims as a source [1] are rather
fluffy on details. Justin organized this information and presentation for the
Intel Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) [2]. More details about the process
he discovered can be found on the ISEF 2012 profile page [3] and for those who
don't want to follow the trail, I've reproduced it here:

"Pancreatic cancer is a devastating disease with a five-year survival rate of
5.5%. One reason for this is the lack of a rapid, sensitive, inexpensive
screening method. A novel paper sensor is described that simply, rapidly and
inexpensively screens for pancreatic cancer. Mia Paca cells overexpressing
mesothelin, a biomarker for pancreatic cancer, were cultured; mesothelin was
isolated, concentrated and quantified with ELISA. After optimization with the
Western Blot assay, the antibody to human mesothelin was dispersed with single
walled carbon nanotubes. This dispersion was used to dip-coat strips of filter
paper, rendering the paper conductive. Optimal layering was determined using a
scanning electron microscope. Cell media spiked with varying amounts of
mesothelin was applied to the paper biosensor. Change in electrical potential
was measured before and after application and a dose-response curve was
constructed with an R2 value of 99.92%. In vivo tests on human blood serum
obtained from healthy people and patients with chronic pancreatitis, PanIn,
pancreatic cancer revealed the same trends.. The sensor’s limit of detection
was found to be 0.156 ng/mL, satisfying the limit of 10 ng/mL, the level
considered an overexpression of mesothelin consistent with pancreatic cancer.
The sensor costs $3.00; 10 tests can be performed per strip. A test takes 5
minutes and is 168 times faster, 26,667 times less expensive, and 400 times
more sensitive than ELISA, 25% to 50% more accurate than the CA10-9 test and
is a sensitive, accurate, inexpensive, and rapid screening tool to detect
mesothelin, a biomarker for pancreatic cancer."

[1] - [http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680194/meet-the-15-year-old-
who-...](http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680194/meet-the-15-year-old-who-is-
changing-how-we-test-for-cancer)

[2] - <http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/>

[3] -
[http://apps.societyforscience.org/intelisef2012/project.cfm?...](http://apps.societyforscience.org/intelisef2012/project.cfm?PID=ME028&CFID=28485&CFTOKEN=10931553)

~~~
polyfractal
Every time an ISEF article pops up, I always sigh out loud and begin a
diatribe [1] about why the winner (invariably in medicine or biology) and the
title (invariably "teenager cures XYZ") is misleading.

To my surprise, it looks like this guy actually did a lot of the research on
his own. At the very least, it appears the ideas was authentically his own,
and then he enlisted the help of a lab to accomplish it.

[1] <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3329605>

Edit: Because HN is killing old permalinks:
<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3328995>

~~~
michaelhoffman
He applied techniques that had been used on breast cancer
(<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21836232>) and prostate cancer
(<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19481922>) to pancreatic cancer. The
implementation is more impressive than what the vast majority of teenagers or
even undergraduates are capable of, but the idea certainly isn't novel.

~~~
polyfractal
Sure sure, I agree with your points. But usually these ISEF winners are even
further removed from "novel" ideas - they are literally placed into projects
that grads/post-docs are already working on.

Effectively, they become another pair of hands on a project that is well
outside their intellectual input.

It looks like this guy synthesized his own idea rather than piggybacking off
the work of another, partially completed project (which is usually the norm
for ISEF winners)

~~~
michaelhoffman
Agreed, that is what it looks like.

------
mistercow
>he’s just pioneered a new, improved test for diagnosing pancreatic cancer
that is 90% accurate

Without more context, that claim is meaningless. Surely it cannot mean "this
test gets the right answer 90% of the time when used on the general
population". Nearly 99.99% of people do not have pancreatic cancer, so if I
make a program that prints out the sentence "You don't have pancreatic
cancer.", then my "test" would have a 99.99% accuracy rate against the general
population.

~~~
ShawnBird
It must mean that it is 90% accurate in identifying cancer. If your test was
given 100 people with PC it would be 100% wrong but this test would be 90%
correct. That is how I am reading it anyway.

~~~
mistercow
But a low false negative rate is equally unimpressive unless it is combined
with a low false positive rate. If I modify my program to always say "You have
pancreatic cancer", then it would have a 0% false negative rate, but it would
still be a worthless test because it would have a 99.99% false positive rate.
Simply knowing the false negative rate is not particularly helpful.

------
larrydag
From the article... "Yes, he even got in trouble in his science class for
reading articles on carbon nanotubes instead of doing his classwork."

This just irks me about our (U.S.) education system. I understand doing
classwork is important. Yet here you have a young student taking interest in
science and engineering and gets in trouble for it? That doesn't make sense to
me at all. The work he's doing should be more than enough credit for his
classwork. Take him aside from the class and foster this work and passion.
He'll learn more science from this one project than doing 10x the amount of
classwork in any syllabus. I see no reason why his science grade could be
reflected on this work.

~~~
wisty
Education is a competitive sport. You don't let Olympic sprinters waste time
playing basketball, or they won't win any medals. If kids waste time learning
about stuff that's not on the exam, they won't get the marks they deserve, and
some other kid will get their place in university.

~~~
cududa
Your metaphor is flawed. By your metaphor this kid is an olympic basketball
player being forced to practice sprinting. Who cares what's on the exam?
Memorizing facts for high school tests isn't any real indicator of knowledge
of intelligence. That is precisely what's wrong with education though. When I
was in High School I got in trouble for designing software and writhing code
on paper. Then I got hired by Microsoft when I was 18, and have been doing
pretty well for myself since.

~~~
jeremyarussell
I got in trouble all the time for tinkering with the school computers and
reading more then doing my homework. (I still aced tests.) I'm making decent
money now programming and computer fixing for a 200+ employee ophthalmology
(eye doctors) office.

------
lifeisstillgood
I am reminded of the Steve Jobs quote, A class people hire other A class
people.

199 rejections, and the Professor that decided to let a 15 year old try a wild
idea is at ... Johns Hopkins.

America may be doing a lot of things foolishly, but mentoring great talent for
the future seems taken care of

~~~
ryanmolden
>A class people hire other A class people.

I like the quote but I think people throw it around far too loosely. It seems
to be an impossibility or else every company founded by A class people
(assumption: there must be at least SOME such companies) would only ever
consist of A class people, but that clearly isn't the case. For sake of
argument let's assume Google, Facebook and Microsoft (and likely many, many
others) were all founded by A class people. Do these companies consist solely
of A class people? If not someone, somewhere, must have hired a non A class
person, thus the hirer themseves couldn't have been A class by the original
statement. You can apply the recursive argument here eventually terminating in
the founders :)

EDIT: Add Apple to the list of companies with (obvious) A class level founding
teams. Funny oversight on my part since the quote is from Steve Jobs himself
:)

~~~
sp332
The rest of the aphorism is: A-class people hire A-class people, but B-class
people hire C-class people. Point being A-class people look for the best,
B-class people look for someone further down on the food chain.

~~~
readymade
who hires B's?

------
drchiu
This is a really neat concept.

I have a MD and a background in biochemistry, and can say most people I've met
in the field of oncology don't nearly have the creativeness and audacity of
this kid's idea. Essentially he's using the carbon nanotube materials, sending
an electric current through it, and detecting minute voltage changes that
occur when cancer proteins bind to the antibodies laced over the nanotubes.

The cost of using nanotubes to detect cancer, however, may be quite
prohibitive. Think 500-1000 dollars per test. On a population screening level,
I don't think most governments or insurance companies would go for it.

------
politician
The real question now is whether this work will be patented and made 26,000
times more expensive or buried.

~~~
drharris
I'm voting buried. No way Big Pharma is letting this one see the light of day.

~~~
refurb
Do you know of any technologies that Big Pharma has suppressed? I'd be
interested to read about it!

~~~
lostlogin
[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.blake.ht...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.blake.html)

Interesting read about a great invention wasted.

~~~
refurb
I don't think that has anything to do with Big Pharma. That's the medical
supply manufacturers using their supply chains to keep the little guys out.

~~~
drharris
Follow the money trail a bit farther and you'll see the pharmaceuticals on the
horizon.

------
spyder
Video about him when receiving the award:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmVzs3-GNBc>

~~~
martinshen
I actually saw this on CollegeHumor scarily enough a week ago.

------
nzeribe
Because "we" are mediocre, our children follow after us, staring out of
classroom windows while teachers prattle on about only-God-knows-what. When we
are inspired and and challenge our kids to do more, they come up with s __*
like this. Age is no barrier! Bravo.

------
benthumb
Great story. You have to admire this young man's drive, determination, and
obvious intellectual precocity. He'll surely go far (he already has).

I also think it's inspirational b/c it points up the importance of synthetic
scientific research done by folks who are so to speak 'out of the fold'. We
need institutional science, clearly, but we also need people who can take a
step back and look at the big picture and see how things fit together.

------
marknutter
I get tired of "X-Year-Old Does Such and Such" posts. If the accomplishment is
newsworthy enough on its own, why can't it stand on its own merit?

~~~
bcrescimanno
A new pancreatic cancer test is absolutely newsworthy on its own (especially
if this one proves out in broader studies). The fact that it was done by a
15-year old makes it even more impressive. It's not unreasonable to applaud a
young person for being way ahead of the curve.

------
majorapps
I'd love to hear the reaction of those universities who initially rejected
this and their reasons.

~~~
polyfractal
Just so it's clear, these were individual labs at universities that rejected
his request. There are a lot of legitimate reasons they may not have wanted to
take him on, including:

-Not enough physical space in lab - most wet labs are crowded with 2-3 people per bench

-No one with enough time to supervise a high school student bumbling around the lab. You basically need a grad student or post-doc babysitting new people (HS student or new grad, doesn't matter) since they don't know where anything is or how to do anything

-Not enough money. Funding has to come from somewhere, and if they don't have money to throw at this particular project they won't.

-Not the focus of the lab. I would hazard a guess that the HS student emailed _anyone_ that was remotely involved in pancreatic cancer or material science. Realistically, there are probably a handful of labs that do this sort of research and the kid just didn't know which ones to email...so he emailed everyone.

-Other. Maybe the professor is teaching? On sabbatical? Already has ten undergrads?

------
molossus
I've actually read about this before, but still never found any technical
details about how the test works. My inner conspiracy theorist worries that a
pharmaceutical corporation has bought this idea up.

~~~
hirenj
I was interested to see what criteria were used to measure performance, but I
haven't found a paper written about it. The most detailed information I could
find was from here:

[http://www.pancan.org/section_research/strategic_research_pr...](http://www.pancan.org/section_research/strategic_research_program/news/topic_maryland_science_fair_pancreatic_cancer_diagnosis.php)

Essentially, this seems pretty damn early as far as results go. There will
probably be a few years before we know it actually works or not.

~~~
pcrh
Without wishing to rain on the kids parade...

There are two aspects to the reported work. The first is the use of carbon
nanotube biosensors incorporating antibodies. Google shows they've been around
for a while and are reportedly more sensitive than previous methods. The
second is using the levels of mesothelin to diagnose pancreatic cancer, this
is less widely established, but was also recently reported by a different lab
([http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040157)).

Putting the two together seems to be the work of Jack Andraka.

~~~
pyre
The fact that a 15 year old digested that information and put the two together
is impressive in itself. Who cares if he was standing on the shoulders of
giants? He bothered to gaze towards the horizon rather than at his own navel.

~~~
pcrh
I agree. Also, it's _possible_ that his work will actually directly lead to a
test for pancreatic cancer, though that would take more work to establish,
obviously.

------
confluence
Is there a law for "something"-year-old does "something" headlines?

I see them all the time - and I hate them because I cynically predict that
what ever it is that they are about to tell me is going to be either trivial,
false or hyped.

I don't blame the kids - I guess it's just to get the clicks/attention for the
news organisations.

If your age is being touted as the reason we should care about what you have
done - then the thing that follows is probably bullshit, trivial or hyped.

Have you ever heard "34"-year-old tech CEO launches new multi billion dollar
product line?

No. You read "Google launches Project Glass".

------
dreadsword
I hate to sound like a dick, but it bugs me that MAKE claims him as one of
their own by arbitrarily labeling him a "Maker." He's not a maker, he's a
research scientist.

------
lhartwich
Straight up awesome!

------
vtry
It has been proven that prostate cancer screening does not improve final
outcome.

~~~
saddino
Especially for pancreatic cancer.

