Every time an ISEF article pops up, I always sigh out loud and begin a diatribe [1] about why the winner (invariably in medicine or biology) and the title (invariably "teenager cures XYZ") is misleading.
To my surprise, it looks like this guy actually did a lot of the research on his own. At the very least, it appears the ideas was authentically his own, and then he enlisted the help of a lab to accomplish it.
He applied techniques that had been used on breast cancer (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21836232) and prostate cancer (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19481922) to pancreatic cancer. The implementation is more impressive than what the vast majority of teenagers or even undergraduates are capable of, but the idea certainly isn't novel.
Sure sure, I agree with your points. But usually these ISEF winners are even further removed from "novel" ideas - they are literally placed into projects that grads/post-docs are already working on.
Effectively, they become another pair of hands on a project that is well outside their intellectual input.
It looks like this guy synthesized his own idea rather than piggybacking off the work of another, partially completed project (which is usually the norm for ISEF winners)
Interesting, and I'm not sure. I just googled my username and "ISEF", knowing it would probably come up. The hackerne.ws link was first that I found...and then I just assumed the permalinks didn't work.
To my surprise, it looks like this guy actually did a lot of the research on his own. At the very least, it appears the ideas was authentically his own, and then he enlisted the help of a lab to accomplish it.
[1] http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3329605
Edit: Because HN is killing old permalinks: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3328995