This startup is using AI to personalize cancer treatment

“We talk about cancer like it’s just one disease, but it’s more like thousands of different diseases,” says Simone Korsgaard Jensen, founder and CEO of Radical Health. “Plus, every individual is very different. But today, we still treat everything with a standardized approach. And that’s where data and AI can especially come in to help.”

In 2024, Jensen created Radical Health through the Entrepreneurs First accelerator program with this idea: that AI’s unique ability to analyze massive amounts of data and provide probabilistic, personalized feedback could reinvent the way patients go through the cancer treatment process.

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“The only way we can (bring together all the research and data available) is by using AI,” Jensen told Fortune. “AI can make treatment recommendations by looking at 10 million patients from the past, finding the most similar patients, and reasoning from that.”

Radical has just emerged from stealth mode, having raised $5 million in pre-seed investment led by Khosla Ventures.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said in an email that he was attracted to the possibility that Radical could democratize information about cancer treatment by leveraging “the expertise of the best oncologists.”

To achieve this, Radical’s model is built with a combination of public data and patient data obtained through partnerships with UCSF (University of California at San Francisco) and the Mayo Clinic.

Information includes imaging, radiology, pathology, genetic data and patient records — covering more than 10 million cases.

And, for patients, it works more or less like other apps: just register, link your medical records and, after about an hour, the system returns a personalized report.

The report recommends therapies and strategies that patients often share with their oncologists. The application is currently free and available to the general public.

One patient, who spoke to Fortune on condition of anonymity because she was in the middle of treatment, said that Radical helped her have tools to talk better with her doctors. It also helped her feel like she has more autonomy.

“Confidence is something I’ve been struggling with a lot throughout this entire experience,” she said.

“Any decision is obviously high-risk, and no treatment is risk-free: ‘This regimen we’re going to apply has cardiac toxicity. This other one has an increased risk of leukemia.’ The really beautiful thing about Radical is that, unlike a single oncologist, she seems very objective.”