Making patients win

America builds cures faster than any country on earth. It delivers them slower than it should. The distance between a laboratory in Boston and a patient in Ohio is not measured in miles.

It is measured in months.

The drug is approved and the patient waits. The trial is open and the patient never hears about it. The doctor knows what to do on the first day and spends the next month getting permission to do it.

None of that is medicine. All of it is time, and time is the one thing a sick person cannot go get more of.

The Gap

A lump in March. A scan in May. A biopsy in June. Treatment in July. Four months, and none of them spent treating her.

Every person she met did their job. Each step made sense on its own. What nobody was responsible for is the distance between the steps, and that is where her spring went.We have built extraordinary parts. We have never built the thing that connects them.

The Loop

Every patient treated in this country teaches us something. Which therapy worked. Which one did not. Who responded and why.

That knowledge is the raw material of the next cure. Almost none of it makes the return trip. So the next trial is designed with less than we already know. The next drug arrives later than it needed to. And the patient after her waits the same four months, for the same reasons, in the same order.

A system that learns gets faster every year. Ours starts over every time.

Why Cancer First?

Cancer keeps the strictest clock. The science moves faster here than anywhere in medicine and the logistics are the worst. Solve it here and the rest is downhill.

What we are after

Ten percent faster to a diagnosis.
Ten percent faster to the right therapy.
Ten percent faster into a trial.
Ten percent faster from what we learn to what we prescribe.
Ten percent sounds modest. Take it out of every step and you have changed the ending.Take it out of March through July and she starts in June.

What we need

This is a build, not a petition. Nobody is going to legislate it into existence.
We need compute. We need models. We need infrastructure. We need clinics willing to go first. We need the researchers and the cures on the other end.
If you have one of those, bring it.

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Started by RISA Labs. Palo Alto, California.