LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Two Louisville high school students just won big for building a device that detects certain forms of cancer before serious symptoms appear.
The two juniors from duPont Manual High School -- Rishabh Ranjan and Gopal Tadinada -- won first place in the biomedical category at the International Science and Engineering Fair.
Ranjan and Tadinada will split the $5,000 first-place prize and a number of scholarships after the pair built a system that detects pancreatic, colorectal and liver cancers.
They hope to patent their device, which screens a blood sample in three hours and costs just $300.
According to the students, they got the idea for the device while volunteering at the Brown Cancer Center and seeing people come in with pancreatic cancer too far along to treat.
"We'd want to implement this in a setting where they could use it in a clinic, during annual check-ups," Tadinada said. "The doctor would just take a blood sample, which they already do, put it in a device and wait three hours for it to screen."
It took Ranjan and Tadinada roughly two years to design and complete the project.
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