CancerHacker Lab™ supports activist patients and startups with “hackathons” – crowds that come together to solve complex problems.

Patients with Complex Problems

We invite a global, cross-discipline and cross-institutional crowd of patients, researchers, providers, pathologists, and bioinformaticians to “hackathons”, where the complex cases of individual patients are analyzed, and their best next treatment is determined.

More Info about Patient Hackathons

Startups Addressing Cancer Patient Challenges

We invite experts and facilitate conversations on the top issues that the startup is facing, e.g., funding, business model, organization, legal status, in regards to addressing cancer patient challenges in education, navigation, and community.

More Info about Startup Hackathons

Participate in Our current Hackathons

Curated online communities of brilliant patients, researchers, and bioinformaticians joining together to solve each patient’s unique problem

Current Hackathons

For ovarian cancer patient
 Shirley Pepke

Shirley Pepke photo

For patients exploring a deep analysis of their metastatic prostate cancer

prostate cancer hackathon faces

Why Hackathons

Patients and their families are overwhelmed.

An explosion of new treatment options and health data about each individual (genomics, proteomics, imaging, monitors, new biomarkers, increased frequency of sensor readings) is overwhelming oncologists and patients. Patients and their friends and family feel lost and despondent.

Impersonal Care

Batch thinking and rigorous adherence to a safe standard of care optimizes for the population but can be suboptimal for an individual patient.

Uncoordinated

Separate services are hard to integrate, and competing incentives (profit, cost, safety) are often at odds with the patient outcomes. Data is hoarded and local.

Incumbents (providers, payers, pharmaceutical companies) have a culture and incentives that put a premium on safety, which is important, but their pace of change is too slow for patients needing innovation.

Activist patients

Some proportion of the million plus people diagnosed each year with cancer are smart and sophisticated and will leave no stone unturned to access their best treatment options, paving the way for others to follow.

Startups

Thousands of entrepreneurs are launching startups to fix the breakdowns that cancer patient experience in the health system and to disrupt the status quo.

Make a difference

Help solve the breakdowns that patients experience.

Learn

Run experiments and have conversations with diverse experts.

Connect

Meet diverse leaders and demonstrate your expertise

Read more about:

Hope

Find new treatment options.

Confidence

Discover the best treatment among the options.

Education

Learn from the experts in diverse domains 

Read more about:

Takeaways from Previous Hackathons

"Thank you for inviting me to the meetings. There are all sorts of perspectives that are new to me. I suspect my IQ gets a bump just by being in the same room with you and your colleagues! I hope to be able to translate them into usable clinical options in my work with patients."
Dr. John Laird
“This would be such a beneficial option for all cancer patients. This is how cancer care should be done.”
Heather Messerly
“Incredible experience for diving into the deep complexities of Rhabdomyosarcoma in a multidisciplinary fashion.”
Conner O'Brien
“There is power in the collective thinking of the medical community and scientists/researchers/entrepreneurial companies coming together to find solutions and treatment options.”
Gail Thornton
“The power of patient engagement.”
Simon Davies
“The quality of decisions about clinical care depends on ensuring that multi-disciplinary, multi-level expertise, including patient and families, is mobilised to address a complex problem for which there are no clear cut answers.”
Tessa S Marcus
“Great work! This approach and platform is desperately needed. I look forward to seeing more patients become a part of this.”
Rebecca Owens
“I love that you have put together these hackathons. I truly feel this is very needed and hope it can grow to become more of the norm in the care of cancer patients. Everyone working together for one common goal, the well-being of the patient.”
Heather Messerly
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