Open Access Empowers 16-Year-Old Jack Andraka To Create Breakthrough Cancer Diagnostic

   Open Access Empowers 16-year-old to Create Breakthrough Cancer Diagnostic: An Interview with Jack Andraka and Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health

Jack Andraka is a perfect example of the power of Open Access, the free availability of all academic research articles online with full reuse rights. Only 16 years old, Jack discovered a breakthrough pancreatic cancer diagnostic using carbon nanotubes. Jack’s test costs $0.03 and takes 5 minutes to run with nearly 100% accuracy so far, making it 26,667 times cheaper, 168 times faster, and 400 times more sensitive than the current test commonly used for pancreatic cancer. Jack went on to win the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. His story would not be possible without Open Access.

“I hit a lot of paywalls, like you have to pay $40 per article, and unfortunately I couldn’t shell out a lot of that,” said Andraka. “So, instead, I would have to cheat and copy the article title back into Google and look for PDF versions, and a lot of the time I actually found them on the NIH PubMed site.”