No matter how precocious you were as a kid, odds are that you were not spending your spare time developing a revolutionary way to diagnose pancreatic cancer. Thank goodness, then, for 15-year-old Jack Andraka, a high school freshman who won this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair with his mind-bogglingly simple (and inexpensive) test, which is 90% accurate, 400 times more sensitive, and 26,000 times less expensive than today’s methods. How did he do it? During a boring biology class, Andraka realized that he could use carbon nanotubes that react to a specific protein and … oh, just let him tell it.

To read more on Andraka, check out our piece from when he first won his prize.

This piece is part of Change Generation, our series on young, change-making entrepreneurs. Read the rest here.