 My story with the cancer that I was drinking with pancreatic cancer began when a scared 13-year-old boy was sitting in the hospital room and found out that a close family friend who was like an uncle had just passed from cancer after three months three to six months of having it and He became very mad very very mad and Suddenly he started not really doing anything at all in school whatsoever His grades slipped and he couldn't really find any motivation to do anything. I was kind of lost at the time However, then I had an idea Maybe with the internet my best friend for knowledge I could find a bit more about this mysterious assassin that I'd taken my uncle So I went online and I found some statistics on pancreatic cancer What I found is that there was a very grim story when it came to cancer 85% of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late when someone has less than a 2% chance of survival Why are we so bad at detecting pancreatic cancer? The reason our current modern medicine is a 60 year old technique. I mean that's older than my dad I mean we have to do better than that. You don't see me carrying around a computer from six years ago I mean I couldn't carry one of those things around but Also, it costs $300 per test and is grossly inaccurate missing 30% of all cancers So after I learned this I aside I'm going to do something about and armed with my ninth grade biology and some Google papers I went with a broad expectation of revolutionizing cancer and Actually happened to much of my surprise 10 months later after emailing 200 professors getting 199 rejections spending seven months in the lab Like blowing up my cells 50 times I finally ended up with one small paper sensor that cost three cents and takes five minutes to run This makes it 168 times faster over 26,000 times as expensive and over 400 times more sensitive than our current standards of detection But also it can detect the cancer in the earliest stages when someone has close to a hundred percent chance of survival But also it's a hundred percent accurate so it could lift the survival rate of pancreatic cancer from 5.5 percent to close to a hundred percent And by switching out component you could pretty much detect any disease in the earliest stages ranging from heart disease all-timers other forms of cancer even HID aids However, there's a problem with it. It seems like a really nice picture, but there's always that like crack in the mirror Unfortunately, it's based on antibodies and take it from me antibodies are like terrible To me that like I'm oil. They are water. We don't mix me and antibodies are like an immortal combat to the end They denature so rapidly and I hate them, but also they can only target one protein The main mission of the point we're going to have to be going towards in the future of medicine is being able to look at all Diseases and that's what the tricorder expires is so with that bit of inspiration and mixed with a bit of hate as every great inspiration comes with I have decided to compete in the tricorder expires of the team of all high school students so So what I'm bringing to it is essentially I create something called a ramen spectrometer and you're thinking is that something with those noodles But no ramen. It's just not for noodles anymore Essentially you use a laser to look at a sample and based on how that laser interacts with the sample you can tell the exact chemical composition of it and However, there's a downfall these things have really cool applications like you can tinker with them and make them Stacked different forms of cancer you can look at environmental contaminants also look at explosives However, they cost a hundred thousand dollars, and I just don't have a hundred thousand dollars to show out on the wrong spectrometer And then also there's a size of a small car and my mom has put up with a lot I mean like she let me culture equal but she's not going to let me like ship in this giant like thing into my room to tinker with So I've said Why can't I make a simple one? That's really inexpensive just like I did with those paper sensors, and I've done that as well I have the luck of the making things simple and inexpensive Essentially, I made one that cost four dollars is the size of your sugar cube and weighs less than a penny it can detect a single molecule of An explosive making it ten thousand times more sensitive the sniffer dog but also can detect cancer as well as environmental contaminants and and so that's only one part of this problem that we're looking at about making it such that we can look at any disease and there are great steps going forward and There's one thing that we're going to have to look at and this is my vision The proteome the proteome it sounds a lot like genome. You can probably make some fancy rhyme out of that however Essentially, it's like your entire protein expression and your tissues and your bloodstream pretty much everything and Using this you could be able to detect disease early You could look you could customize a single protein and like fold it really exactly to target only that one cell And so that's the ultimate and equals one personalized medicine paradigm there however Nothing was really happening there, but we haven't really seen any work on that and We really need this because in my opinion frankly, it's going to kick the genomic revolutions ass You would be able to do so much stuff with this And so what we're going to really need is a sensor that you would be able to look into your bloodstream and Constantly modern on a daily basis your entire protein expression But also then you would have to have an algorithm that transfers all that knowledge into being able to track it over time And then we would be able to know so much about you and we'd be able to Meet it like we could make that we could connect that to your genome and say hey you're probably going to get this like at age 41 and preemptively treat that such that it costs you maybe like five dollars to get treated for a disease and so that's what the Protein will bring the protein will revolutionize medicine and With that you will be able to live longer happier and stronger lies bunch of people are pessimistic as always the door might be the glass half empty girl over there but Imagine this I'm a 15 year old, but I came up actually 14 year old when I came up with this idea For a pancreatic cancer detection. I Didn't know where pancreas was So it was a bit of a low baseline there of knowledge but Using just Google Wikipedia. I found a new way to detect pancreatic cancer So if I could do that just imagine what you could do. Thank you