Stephanie Kuku, M.D. maps the frontier at DOC 2024
(This article was created in collaboration with Claude AI)
Key Takeaways:
- The Real Bet? (Modifiable) Risk Prediction. Dr. Stephanie Kuku, surgical oncologist and Chief Knowledge Officer at Conceivable Life Sciences, believes the greatest leap in cancer care won’t come from new treatments, but from preventing cancer before it happens through smarter, AI-powered risk prediction tools.
- Multimodal Data Is the Future. Kuku envisions combining diverse data streams — microbiome, imaging, environment, pathology, behavior — into predictive AI networks that flag cancer risk decades before diagnosis.
- Youthful Diagnoses Are on the Rise. Cancers before age 50 have increased by 80%. Kuku, 45, points to cases like Kate Middleton and Olivia Munn to underscore the urgency for earlier, smarter screening.
- The Tech Isn’t Ready — Yet. Despite the hype, we’re still at square one. Integrating complex data and building validated, unbiased algorithms remains a massive challenge.
- Her Hope Is Personal. Kuku wants this future to arrive not in theory, but in time for her own daughter, now just a child.
At DOC 2024’s inaugural gathering in Yountville, California, surgical oncologist and tech strategist Dr. Stephanie Kuku stood at the fault line between today’s medicine and tomorrow’s promise. As Chief Knowledge Officer of Conceivable Life Sciences and an advisor to over 70 AI startups, Kuku brought both a scalpel’s precision and a strategist’s foresight to the stage at the “Smarter than Cancer” session.
“We are just at the start,” she told the audience — a sobering reminder that while AI and machine learning have won Nobel Prizes and headlines in 2024, their practical impact on oncology is still in its infancy.
But make no mistake: her vision is bold. Imagine an AI trained not just on tumor data, but on your gut microbiome, your CT scans, your sleep habits, the air you breathe. Now imagine it flags you at 42: High risk. Breast cancer by 49 if nothing changes.
“That’s where we need to be,” Kuku said.
Why the urgency? Because cancer isn’t waiting. Diagnoses under 50 have surged by 80%, a statistic that moves from abstract to visceral when paired with public figures like Kate Middleton (43) and Olivia Munn (44). Kuku, herself 45, feels this urgency not just professionally but personally — as a woman, a doctor, and a mother.
Her forecast for where AI will have the most impact in oncology? Not in treatment, but in prevention.
“If you were to ask me where I would put my money, it would be in risk prediction — modifiable risk prediction,” she explained. Prevention, not reaction, is where the game-changing returns lie. But she’s not naive about the roadblocks: siloed data, underpowered models, and systems built without real clinical integration.
Still, Kuku is no stranger to navigating complexity. In 2020, she authored a WHO framework on Evidence Generation for AI in Health, with a focus on Cancer screening. That pragmatism grounds her optimism.
“The future is further away than we think,” she admits, “but it’s coming. And it’s going to revolutionize cancer care. I just hope we’re there by the time my daughter is 21.”