Meet the people behind CancerBot
Our team brings decades of experience in AI, medical research, and data science. Together, we’re committed to making clinical trials more accessible and personalized for cancer patients everywhere.
Jude Fitzgibbon
Board Member
Jude Fitzgibbon, PhD, is Professor of Personalised Cancer Medicine at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, and a consultant to the pharma/biotech industry. Formerly VP of Heme Discovery at AstraZeneca and Director at Barts, he has led major research programs in lymphoma. He holds a BA from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD from UCL. Jude’s research focuses on hematological malignancies, particularly follicular lymphoma. He has an h-index of 58 and multiple academic honors.
Steven Labkoff
Board Member
Steven Labkoff, MD, is a leading clinician-informatician with over 30 years of experience in life sciences and healthcare. He is VP of Development and Medical Analytics at Bristol Myers Squibb and a collaborating scientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Formerly Chief Data Officer at the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, he built the largest multi-data registry in oncology. His career includes roles at Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Deloitte. He is a Fellow of ACMI, ACP, and AMIA.
Dan Turchin
Board Member
Dan Turchin is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and product leader with a passion for building technology that transforms lives. He brings deep experience in AI and SaaS platforms, with a focus on improving user experience and solving complex real-world problems. As an early-stage investor and advisor, Dan supports innovative teams working at the intersection of data and human impact. He’s committed to using technology to drive meaningful change in healthcare and beyond.
William Briggs
Director of Biomedical AI
William Briggs began his career in an academic setting, working on a PhD focused on applying NLP to clinical research data and tackling the challenges of medical language. He has since worked as a data scientist across both medical research and patient EMRs, developing NLP tools that extract insights from complex healthcare data. At CancerBot, he bridges the medical annotation and technical teams, helping enhance the platform’s accuracy and performance.
Adam Blum
Founder and CEO
Adam is the founder and technical innovator behind several successful startups including Rhomobile (sold to Motorola), OpenEd (sold to ACT) and Skillmore (sold to Apollo Education Group). OpenEd and Skillmore were both early pioneers in using AI Large Language Models for until then unsolved problems: inferring skills for educational resources (OpenEd) and inferring skills for corporate employees (Skillmore). Adam wrote what may be the first applied neural networks text (Neural Networks in C++, Wiley, 1992) and has taught courses at both University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. Adam's cancer journey as a follicular lymphoma survivor drove him to the initial development of CancerBot as a free service.
Our mission and vision
Our mission
To empower cancer patients by making clinical trial access simple, accurate, and patient-focused.
Our vision
A world where every cancer patient has the opportunity to find the best available treatments, regardless of medical expertise or background. We believe that AI can democratize access to potentially life-saving clinical trials, giving patients more choices and more hope.
Turning frustration into innovation
After being diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, AI tech entrepreneur Adam Blum assumed he could easily find the latest treatment options. However, he was met with resistance from doctors and a confusing, fragmented search process. Adam quickly discovered that most existing clinical trial databases weren’t designed for patients—they were built for medical professionals, filled with jargon and requiring detailed knowledge that patients typically don’t have.
This frustrating experience inspired Adam to create a better solution. Drawing on his background in AI, he envisioned a platform that would use technology to bridge the gap between patients and clinical trials. CancerBot was born out of this mission: to make trial matching accessible, personalized, and jargon-free. Today, CancerBot is helping patients like Adam find potential life-saving treatments faster and more easily than ever before.
