Jack Andraka was 15 when death taught him an uncomfortable question.
A very close friend of his family, someone he loved like an uncle, died of pancreatic cancer in Crownsville, Maryland, after going from healthy to becoming a skeleton in just three months. Jack searched for answers on Google and found a brutal statistic: 85% of these cancers are detected so late that the patient has barely a 2% chance of surviving.
In a scientific paper, he found the clue: a protein called mesothelin that surges in the early stages of the disease. He had the idea, but not the laboratory. He sent 200 emails to researchers across the country and received 199 rejections. Only Johns Hopkins opened its doors to him.
Seven months later, with pathologist Anirban Maitra as his guide, a paper strip capable of detecting cancer in five minutes was born, with more than 90% accuracy, for just 3 cents. In 2012, he won first prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Science had been searching for that answer for decades, and it was in a teenager willing to keep insisting 200 times.