Slashing Cancer Deaths in Five Years: Dr. Marty Tenenbaum’s Bold Vision at UCLA LABEST 2024
At UCLA LABEST 2024, Dr. Marty Tenenbaum, Founder and Chairman of Cancer Commons, delivered a keynote that was both deeply personal and profoundly visionary. His central thesis: we can slash cancer mortality by 25% in five years—not by waiting for new drugs, which take a decade or more to develop—but by radically transforming how we match patients with existing treatments using artificial intelligence, real-world data, and patient-centered innovation.
A Survivor’s Perspective Becomes a Mission
Dr. Tenenbaum's journey began in Silicon Valley, where he helped pioneer internet commerce. His innovations in computing and AI shaped an entire era—robots he built now sit in the Smithsonian. But in 1998, everything changed. He was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma and given just nine months to live. He quickly discovered a disturbing reality: even with wealth, access, and connections, cancer patients often face an overwhelming number of unproven options—and too little data to make informed decisions.
Tenenbaum's life was saved by a clinical trial that “failed” in the eyes of the FDA but worked for him. Unfortunately, the trial’s data and drugs were discarded. “I resolved,” he said, “that if I got my health back, I would ensure this never happens to another patient again.”
The Birth of Cancer Commons
Out of that commitment, Cancer Commons was born. The nonprofit provides advanced cancer patients—those beyond the standard of care—with personalized, data-informed guidance. It matches them with researchers, physicians, experimental trials, or even emerging innovations years before they’re approved. Since its founding, Cancer Commons has helped over 10,000 patients. But the real need is closer to 10,000 per month. Manual processes simply don’t scale.
A Learning Health System: Introducing xCures
To solve this, Dr. Tenenbaum launched xCures, a health IT company automating and scaling the Cancer Commons model. The goal: to build a real-time, continuously learning health system.
xCures pulls in electronic medical records from across thousands of providers, structuring vast PDFs into concise patient timelines. These structured profiles allow for advanced matching—both to existing therapies and to expert recommendations—and create the foundation for a “perpetual trial” system. Every patient becomes part of a larger, ongoing learning experiment, where treatment results feed back into a growing dataset.
Data from the People, for the People
A major limitation in cancer research today is that data is siloed. Hospitals hoard it. Pharma keeps it private. Tenenbaum’s answer: go directly to the patients. With proper consent, xCures aggregates real-world data from patients themselves—currently over 200,000 and growing to millions by year’s end. That patient-sourced data is shared across a distributed research ecosystem.
This grassroots data strategy could revolutionize cancer care. It enables three transformational shifts:
1. Elevate All Care to the Level of the Best
Outcomes often decline dramatically outside of elite cancer centers. What if every patient could benefit from the knowledge of top-performing physicians? Using real-world outcome data, xCures can identify best-in-class treatment strategies—not hypothetically, but empirically—and deliver them to community oncologists in real time.
This alone, Tenenbaum argued, could save many lives without inventing anything new. “It’s about getting existing knowledge to where it’s needed.”
2. Learn from Every Patient, Not Just Clinical Trials
Today’s clinical trials are slow, expensive, and rigid. Worse, they ignore the vast majority of cancer patients. Dr. Tenenbaum flipped this paradigm. “Thousands of experiments are happening every day in oncology clinics,” he said. “Desperate doctors are tweaking combinations. We just don’t learn from them.”
Through Cancer Commons and xCures, every patient interaction becomes a data point. These micro-experiments are captured, analyzed, and fed into a shared knowledge base. It’s a shift from approving drugs to curing patients.
3. Accelerate Innovation-to-Clinic Cycles
The third pillar of Dr. Tenenbaum’s strategy is accelerating access to innovation. “Anything not already in the clinic today won’t help cancer patients in five years,” he noted. But what if innovations in diagnostics, off-label combinations, or digital pathology could get into the clinic faster?
Cancer Commons enables this by matching cutting-edge companies and research labs with late-stage patients in need. Whether it’s:
Precision diagnostics that eliminate guesswork,
AI-driven combinations of existing therapies,
Early detection tools for pre-symptomatic cancer,
or off-label combinations needing exploratory validation,
—Tenenbaum’s model offers a sandbox for testing them quickly and ethically, often under compassionate use or single-subject INDs.
A Capital Revolution: De-Risking Investment in Innovation
Dr. Tenenbaum didn’t stop at patient care or research transformation—he also outlined a new investment model. “We’re raising $50 to $100 million for an impact fund,” he announced, “to back these innovations early.”
Instead of requiring full-scale trials upfront, this fund would back pilot-scale, real-world validations—small-dollar investments to test promising therapies in real patients. If a strong signal emerges, the fund can double down. This “venture science” approach turns the traditional pharma model on its head.
Moreover, this fund is being raised primarily from family offices and impact investors—many of whom have a personal connection to cancer. It’s a way to turn grief into action and accelerate the path to impact.
A Platform for the Ecosystem
Dr. Tenenbaum emphasized that the platform is “just the context”—the real breakthroughs come from the science and technology being developed by the broader community. Cancer Commons doesn’t compete with innovators; it amplifies them. The organization:
Connects companies and researchers with patients and physicians
Enables validation of new technologies in real-world settings
De-risks early-stage investment by generating human outcomes data
Provides patient navigation services to interpret novel diagnostics
Supports AI models with structured, validated datasets
From digital imaging to liquid biopsies, multi-vendor data integration, and AI decision support, Tenenbaum’s vision is an open, modular system where patients, physicians, researchers, and investors all plug in.
The Promise: A 25% Reduction in Cancer Mortality
Dr. Tenenbaum concluded his talk with a bold claim: “If we can do even a few of these things, we’ll have a very good shot at slashing cancer mortality by 25% in five years.” That would save hundreds of thousands of lives annually.
And yet, he was humble about the role of his own organization. “Cancer Commons can provide the context,” he said, “but the meat—the real magic—is the innovation you are developing.”
His call to action was clear:
Researchers: bring us your tests, your models, your ideas.
Doctors: refer patients who’ve exhausted standard care.
Investors: back a new kind of clinical validation engine.
Patients and families: use our services. Everything is free and supported by philanthropy.
Dr. Tenenbaum’s keynote was a blueprint for the future of oncology. It weaved together hard-earned personal experience, elite technical expertise, and a deep understanding of the systemic barriers that delay progress.
By reframing cancer care as a learning system, and by empowering patients as both participants and data partners, Dr. Tenenbaum has offered a model that is scalable, ethical, and fast. He showed how it’s possible to do more with what we already have—if we’re bold enough to reorganize the system.
In the words that closed his talk:
“If you know anyone with a serious cancer, send them to Cancer Commons. We've done this for 10,000 others—and everything we do is free for patients.”
That quiet urgency is what made his message land. Because for those facing late-stage cancer, five years isn't just a strategic horizon. It's a lifeline.