Location
MIT Media Lab, E14-633
Description
Every year 1.6 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer and nearly half of those cases are considered incurable. But many of those “incurable” cases may be beatable by exploiting biological features unique to each individual’s cancer. Marty Tenenbaum will talk about a convergence of recent developments in genomics, big data informatics, social networks, and personalized medicine that is transforming the landscape of cancer research and treatment. Instead of aiming our efforts toward curing “cancer” in the abstract, and often failing, we are now on the threshold of being able to give each individual the knowledge, resources, and tools needed to successfully treat the one disease that matters most to them.
In this new paradigm, cancer is managed as a chronic disease using an evolving cocktail of targeted immunotherapies individualized for each patient, much like HIV. Every treatment event is considered as a probe that simultaneously treats the patient and provides an opportunity to validate and refine the models on which the treatment decisions are based. Dr. Tenenbaum will discuss the challenges and opportunities of this personalized approach to oncology from an informatics perspective, including providing patients and their physicians with up-to-the-moment treatment recommendations, capturing the results of each patient encounter, rapidly extrapolating them to other patients, and coordinating all patient encounters to efficiently search the space of therapeutic options.
Biographies
Marty Tenenbaum is a renowned computer scientist, Internet entrepreneur, and cancer survivor. He founded Cancer Commons to help each cancer patient obtain the best possible outcome. Cancer Commons is a non-profit open science initiative, where cancer patients are treated in accord with the latest knowledge, and that knowledge is continually updated based on each patient’s response. Learn more at cancercommons.org. Dr. Tenenbaum is a fellow and former board member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a former consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford. Dr. Tenenbaum holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Stanford.