Spent some time over the holiday thinking about the convergence between the two areas of my professional life - cancer research & clinical oncology - and areas of innovation spanning these worlds that I'm excited about as we (hopefully) emerge from the pandemic:

[1/7]

1) Convergence of biology and interpretable deep learning for all sorts of cancer discovery and clinical use cases

2) “Clinical” single cell/spatial analysis across cancer domains/contexts - for prognostic/predictive signatures & drug discovery on cell types/interactions

3) Ancestrally diverse germline & somatic cancer genomics at scale - new signals of disease and possibly new drug targets

4) Revisiting the noncoding cancer genome - wonder if there’s more there...(?)

5) Studying resistance to the latest wave of drugs/classes that have emerged

6) Seamless patient interactions with their health data - COVID vaccine status is going to push the need → handling more complex patient info (e.g. from cancer patients) so patients can share their data with providers (and researchers!) will be *huge*...

7) ...as will new ways to engage patients directly in research & empower them & share data - particularly post-pandemic...

8) ...and creating new virtual societies for trainees & profs alike to fill new interdisciplinary domains, e.g. for MD computer nerds like me

9) Equitable health tech - apps for tracking health & disease that work for ppl who can’t/don’t access fancy tech = mission critical

10) Radically redesigned EHR UI/UX that enables patient-health system interactions via hybrid model (some in clinic, some remote)

Plus there are certainly more (promised myself I'd just list 10)

Would love more thoughts, engage with folks in these areas, and will check in on this thread over the end of the year to see how things are going...

Hope for a happy, healthy, and vaccinated new year for all <fin>