It took a 16-year-old to bring the ideacity crowd to its feet.

Maryland high school student Jack Andraka had some 500 conference-goers wildly cheering his novel paper strip sensor that can detect cancer in minutes and for pennies.

But they also roared their approval for his ideas on levelling the economic playing field so that all young minds, regardless of wealth or ethnicity, have access to the tools and information they need to move science and medicine forward.

Coming from a crowd focused on technology and innovation, that was the kind of praise that could go to a teen’s head. But not Andraka’s. His IQ may be miles high but his feet are firmly planted on the ground.

“That was pretty exciting,” he admitted backstage Friday after his talk. “I’m always surprised when I get that reaction. It really validates what I am talking about.”

As if he needs it.

Andraka has been recognized and honoured by, among others, the Smithsonian, Popular Science, U.S. President Barack Obama, the documentary You Don’t Know Jack and the $75,000 2012 Gordon E. Moore Award, the grand prize of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

Watch the YouTube videos of his win and you’ll see a gangly wildly enthusiastic youth who insists to all he’s just a typical teen. On his Twitter profile, his love of whitewater rafting trumps his science and math interests.

But behind those braces and under that Justin Bieber-like haircut sits the kind of mind that can make the connections between a reading for eighth grade biology class and a revolutionary test strip that, like pregnancy or diabetes strips, can detect pancreatic cancer much earlier than any current diagnostic procedure.

Right now, 85 per cent of pancreatic cancers are detected too late to save the patient. The disease is notoriously deadly, with only one in 20 people making it past the five-year mark. That’s why early detection is crucial.

“The strip works in five minutes and for three cents,” Andraka told the Star. “That’s 168 times faster, 26,000 times less expensive, 400 times more sensitive than the current gold standard (test). It has 100-per-cent accuracy.”

The strip essentially senses mesothelin, a biomarker for pancreatic cancer as well as ovarian and lung cancers.

“The sensor is the sensor for all three cancers,” he said, adding he hopes to see it sell over the counter in 10 years. “It will tell you ‘Something is wrong. Go see your doctor.’ ”

Andraka’s patented work is about to be published in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) which advocates for the free distribution of scientific and medical articles.

Andraka and three of his more scientifically minded friends are now working on winning the Qualcomm TriCorder X-Prize by coming up with a hand-held device that will, with a simple scan of the skin, detect everything from Alzheimer’s to AIDS. The teens are competing against 300 adult teams for the $10-million award.

Despite his scientific background — Andraka’s father is an engineer, his mother an anesthetist and his brother a prizewinner as well — he had a tough time finding a university lab in which he could develop his strip. He wrote to some 200 professors at MIT and Johns Hopkins seeking lab access and all but one rejected him.

That’s one reason why it’s important to him that other youth have access to scientific innovation and research. He’s against paywalls for scientific journals — PLOS is free — and he wants to see universal Internet access.

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“Even Harvard University can’t afford to keep paying for journals,” he maintains. “What does that say about access for smaller schools? That’s discriminating against people on the basis of wealth.

“Knowledge should be a basic human right. Internet access should be a basic human right. Through the Internet anything is possible. Age, race and gender shouldn’t count. Just your ideas should count.”

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