15-year-old tells TED 2013 audience how he used Internet to invent early detection tool for cancer

Jack Andraka catapulted from being a typical US teenager unaware of the pancreas to one with a cheap way to detect cancer in the organ before it turns deadly.

“Through the Internet, anything is possible,” Andraka said while telling the story of his screening breakthrough at a prestigious TED Conference in Southern California on Wednesday.

“There is so much more to it than posting duck-face pictures of yourself online,” he continued, sucking in his cheeks and pushing out his lips to playfully underscore his point.

“If a 15-year-old who didn’t know what a pancreas was could figure out a way to detect pancreatic cancer, imagine what you could do.”

Andraka, who turned 16 in January, recounted how three years ago he began scouring the Internet for information about pancreatic cancer after it killed a cherished family friend.

He told of being shocked to learn that the cancer was typically found too late to save people. On top of that, the test used to screen for the illness was 60 years old, he said.

“That is older than my dad,” Andraka quipped. “More important, it is expensive, inaccurate, and your doctor would have to be ridiculously suspicious that you had the cancer to give you this test.”

He figured what was needed was a test that was inexpensive, fast, simple and sensitive.

“Undeterred due to my teenage optimism, I went online to a teenager’s two best friends: Google and Wikipedia,” Andraka said.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/28/american-15-year-old-tells-ted-2013-audience-how-he-used-internet-to-invent-early-detection-tool-for-cancer/