Breakthrough by Jack Andraka Page A

all my research, and especially my computer, and make a huge bonfire out in the backyard. I figured we already had enough kindling lying around. Maybe do a new experiment on how quickly accelerants could combust a laptop!
    I could visualize myself dancing around the fire and then walking down to my basement/science lab and trashing it in a wild fit of rage. I would take that bat (the one I could never seem to connect with to hit an actual baseball) and just go to town on these awful science projects.
    After I had finished on the basement, I would stomp right up the stairs and into my brother’s bedroom to demolish all his awards and his science experiments. The thought of it felt . . . so . . . remarkably . . . satisfying.
    None of that happened. Instead, I just took a deep breath and pushed on. I kept moving forward, highlighting sections of what I had read that I could understand until eventually more and more words began to make sense to me. Where at first it felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall, eventually, one by one, a few of those bricks began to fall. After staring at the pages long enough, I was able to actually understand what I was reading in the journals.
    Now that I could understand what I was reading, my search for the biomarker moved a whole lot quicker. By the end of October, Iwas able to narrow it down from eight thousand to about fifty proteins. That was great, of course, but my work was hardly finished. While fifty may seem like a manageable number, these weren’t just any proteins. These were the toughest, most time-consuming proteins of all, in large part because there was almost no research available on them.
    Finally, when I was halfway through my short list and on the brink of losing my sanity, I came upon a protein called mesothelin. I ran it through my gauntlet of checklists, cross-referencing it against all needed criteria in my online database. It was passing test after test. I held my breath. After so many false hopes, I had been conditioned to keep my enthusiasm at bay until I knew for sure. I kept pulling up research papers for more information.
    Was it up-regulated? Yes!
    What body fluid was this protein found in? If it was in spinal fluid, that wouldn’t work. (Ask anyone who has had a spinal tap, and they will tell you that would not fit my criterion of “easy.”) For my test to work, the biomarker had to be in the blood or urine.
    Was it in the blood? Check!
    That’s it! Mesothelin!
    It was the breakthrough I had been waiting for.
    I began jumping up and down and screaming for my mother.
    â€œMom, Mom, it’s mesothelin!”
    â€œWhat?” my mom asked, understandably dumbfounded. “Issomething wrong? Who is mesothelin?”
    â€œNo, the biomarker, I found it, it’s called mesothelin.”
    â€œOh! I knew you could do it, Jack!” she said. Now she was screaming too. “Does this mean you found the test?”
    Well . . . no. But it was a step. A big one.
    What it did mean was that if someone has pancreatic, ovarian, or even lung cancer, mesothelin is found at very high levels in their bloodstream. But the research papers also indicate that it’s found in the earliest stages of the disease, when, if the cancer is detected, someone has close to a 100 percent chance of survival.
    As often happens in science, the answer to one problem raised a new question. How did I plan on actually finding this protein in people? I knew that without a way of actually detecting that protein, and, thus, pancreatic cancer, my discovery and all my hard work were essentially useless in the real world.
    Again, I scoured the internet and began to print out every article on mesothelin and detection methods that I could find. I became consumed, taking the articles with me to school to read while I was supposed to be working on my class work.
    One day shortly after the midway point of my freshman year, I snuck an article