Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest known types of cancer. The 5-year survival rate for sufferers is around 6% and 40,000 people die each year from it. Most people aren’t even diagnosed from it until after it has spread.
The reason is that the pancreas is nested deeply in the body cavity and it’s difficult to image unless you use MRI machines. For most people, that comes way too late. Early, cheap detection would go a long way towards saving thousands of lives.
Enter Jack Andraka, a 15-year-old high school student who invented a way that may be able to detect this cancer in as little as 5 minutes. It’s a small dipstick probe that uses a sixth of a drop of blood.
As cancer develops, the body develops an overabundance of a protein called mesothelin. Until Jack Andraka’s breakthrough, there wasn’t a way to raise a red flag of too much mesothelin in the body. Let’s hope that this is properly developed and deployed soon.