Colin and I are delighted to have Mr. Jack Andraka with us as our first guest for Healthcare Leadership Tweet Chat. Jack has been in the news a lot lately – and for good reason – he has invented a revolutionary way to detect lethal pancreatic cancers.
In his words Jack explains his research:
“Last year I created a novel paper sensor for the detection of pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancers. It’s a small strip of paper about the size of a diabetes test strip that I made by dipping the paper into a combination of single walled carbon nanotubes and antibodies. When a sample of blood containing the protein biomarker that is over expressed in these cancers is dropped onto the sensor the electrical resistance of the sensor changes and this can be detected using an inexpensive OHM meter from Home Depot.”
Last week Jack was invited to sit in the box with Mrs. Obama during the State of the Union Address. This past Saturday Jack spoke for the Royal Society of Medicine and in doing so become the youngest person to ever present to this esteemed organization at the tender age of 15.
Jack describes himself on his Twitter Bio as a whitewater kayaker, scientist, and mathematician.
Tuesday Feb 19, 2013 will be the first time we have invited a guest to our tweet chat. In order to ensure we provide a comfortable space for Jack and so we can have as much sharing of insights as possible we would like to provide some additional guidelines.
- Jack would like to focus on Open Source Access and ways we can help to connect kids to the Internet to help them solve problems.
- As we all know tweet chats can be very fast and frenzied. We believe there will be lots of people joining us so we would like to ensure that Jack has adequate time to answer T1 and T2 before we open up the chat to more questions from our community.
- Please help us remain on topic tomorrow night and keep the focus on Jack. There will be time toward the end of the chat for any announcements or “Shout outs” our community would like to share.
Both Colin and I are excited Jack has agreed to join us tomorrow night and we look forward to introducing him to our Healthcare Leader community.
UPDATE
We had an amazing turnout and a fantastic chat with Jack last night. Over 70 people joined in a very lively discussion about Open Access, publishing and innovation. There were tons of great ideas, comments and insights by the #hcldr community. It definitely was one of our best chats ever. You can find a transcript here. You can also find a wonderful Visual Transcript by Lisa Fields here
Additional Information about Jack:
hcldr 
[…] Access to scientific research was a central topic of Tuesday’s #HCLDR (Healthcare Leadership) Twitter Chat with 16-year old Jack Andraka, the prodigious young researcher. By now, many in the medical […]