Jack Andraka, an American teenage prodigy, claimed to have developed a cheap and quick test for pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer based on detecting mesothelin using nanotechnology.[12] Although claims were made that the new test was "over 400 times more sensitive than the current gold standard of detection",[13] a conventional commercial test for soluble mesothelin [14] has a sensitivity of less than 10 ng/ml, and an assay for a mesothelin property, metakaryotype potentiating factor, has a similar high sensitivity.[11] The middle 50% of normal persons have a level as high as 80 ng/ml (2 nmol/L, 40Kdalton for soluble mesothelin); 25% of normal persons had a yet higher level when using the same assay. This level, according to a refutation published by Sharon et al [11] in the same year as the Intel award, produces the difficulty in distinguishing normal persons from pancreatic cancer patients, in that the serum levels of mesothelin overlap greatly between normal and cancer patients. Pancreatic cancer patients representing multiple stages of disease did not have serum mesothelin levels higher than was normal.