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Famous New York train station turns 100

Teenage Cancer Researcher

American lawmakers filled the Capitol building earlier this week for President Obama’s State of the Union message. 16 -year-old Jack Andraka of Maryland was in the crowd. In fact, he sat in the same box as the president’s wife Michelle. Kelly Jean Kelly tells us why he was invited to the speech.

Jack Andraka won the grand prize at the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. It is the largest high school science competition in the world.

The Maryland teenager is the youngest winner of the $75 thousand award. He was chosen from among 1,500 students in 70 countries.

Jack Andraka invented a test for pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of cancer. He learned that after losing a close family friend to the disease.

“I went on the Internet and I found that 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than a two percent chance of survival,” he says,” and I was thinking, ‘That’s not right. We should be able to do something.’”

He learned people with pancreatic cancer have higher than normal levels of a protein called mesothelin in their blood. He also found that early discovery is important to increasing the chances of surviving the disease.

The Maryland teenager requested and received permission to work in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. There he developed a simple paper test, which can identify the protein in a single drop of blood. His test has proven correct 90 percent of the time. It also is 100 times more sensitive than other tests.