Why I'm Building CureWise

A Founder's Journey from Patient to Purpose

When the Palisades fire destroyed our home in January 2025, I thought that was the worst thing that could happen to us. I was wrong. The fire saved my life.

For months, I'd been telling my doctors something wasn't right. At 60, I'd lost weight, felt drained, had no appetite. I pushed for every test imaginable—full body scans, colonoscopy, endoscopy, cardiac function tests. The gastroenterologist found nothing serious. The cardiologist called it a "fishing expedition" and suggested stress. They all missed what was silently killing me.

Then came that steak dinner in Palm Desert, where we'd fled after the fire. The severe pain that followed landed me in an emergency room with doctors who didn't know me, had no preconceptions, and ordered fresh tests. Within days, they found what everyone else had missed: an aggressive blood cancer in my bone marrow. The fire's displacement had given me the fresh eyes that caught my cancer while it was still treatable.

The Builder Becomes the Patient

I've spent my career as a technology pioneer. Two decades ago, I founded Health Hero Network and helped invent remote patient monitoring, proving that technology could transform how we manage chronic disease. I've been granted over 200 patents in health technology and AI. But lying in that hospital bed for nine days of tests and biopsies, I became something else: another cancer patient navigating a system overwhelmed by complexity.

I was lucky—the fresh eyes of new doctors caught my cancer early enough to treat. But I couldn't stop wondering: why had my earlier doctors missed it when I'd had so many tests? What would AI have discovered given the same data?

So I did what builders do—I experimented. I created Haley, an AI medical agent, and fed her the exact same data all those doctors had seen weeks earlier: my complete medical history, labs, imaging results, doctor notes. Within moments, she flagged what everyone had missed: patterns indicating bone marrow dysfunction. She recommended specific tests—serum free light chains, bone marrow biopsy—that no human had suggested. AI saw in minutes what months of appointments had missed.

From One AI to a Swarm

Diagnosis was just the beginning. The real power of AI revealed itself in treatment decisions. When I analyzed my cytogenetics report—the DNA fingerprint of my cancer cells—with my AI agents, we discovered something crucial: I had genetic variants that would likely make the standard treatment less effective for me. There were other treatments, some off-label combinations, that better matched my specific mutations.

Armed with AI-powered insights, I advocated for these alternative therapeutic options. The results validated everything: these AI-informed treatments are proving far more effective for my specific cancer than the initial standard of care would have been. AI didn't just help with diagnosis—it guided me to the precise treatments my unique cancer would respond to.

I built more AI agents—an oncologist, a hematologist, a gastroenterologist, each trained to think like their human counterparts. Then I created Hippocrates, a synthesis agent to integrate their insights. Together, they became my partners in understanding not just what I had, but what would work best for me specifically.

The N-of-1 Revolution

This experience crystallized everything I'd learned in 35 years of building health technology: We practice medicine designed for populations, not people. We have "standards of care" based on median outcomes from clinical trials. But when it's your life on the line, you don't care about the median. You care about you. Your unique cancer. Your specific mutations. You are an N of 1.

Last year alone, 1.3 million new papers were published in PubMed—over 3,500 every day. No doctor can keep up. But AI can process all of it, connecting an immunology paper from Japan with a gene therapy trial from Boston and a treatment protocol from Sweden. When that knowledge is applied to your individual case, it becomes something extraordinary: precision medicine that sees you, not a statistic.

Building CureWise

My cancer journey isn't over, but it has given me absolute clarity about what needs to exist in the world. CureWise is the manifestation of everything I learned as both a technology pioneer and a cancer patient. We're building the AI system I desperately needed—one that will ensure no one else has to build their own swarm of agents while fighting for their life.

CureWise will be different because it's built by someone who's been in the chair, felt the fear, and discovered firsthand how AI can illuminate what human limitation obscures. Our multi-agent architecture mirrors what I built for myself, but trained on thousands of patient journeys, constantly learning which treatments work for which unique genetic profiles.

We're not replacing doctors. We're amplifying human wisdom with machine intelligence. We're democratizing the ability to understand your unique cancer fingerprint and match it to the treatments most likely to work for you specifically—not for the average patient in a clinical trial.

The Mission That Drives Us

Every day I look at my blood tests and see my AI-informed treatment working—working better than the standard of care ever could have for my specific genetic profile. I was lucky that fresh eyes caught my cancer early. I was luckier still that I had the technical background to explore what AI could reveal about my unique case.

But luck shouldn't determine outcomes. Every week, I think about the patients who won't get that second look, who don't have the ability to build their own AI agents, who are getting standard treatments that won't work for their unique cancers, who are running out of time while better options exist—if only someone could connect the dots in their data.

That's why I'm building CureWise. Because having spent decades proving technology can transform healthcare—from pioneering telemedicine to advancing AI—I know that precision oncology powered by AI is the key to curing cancer. Because I've lived the difference between population medicine and precision medicine. Because I've seen what happens when AI illuminates what human doctors cannot see.

The Palisades fire destroyed our home but revealed my cancer in time to fight it. Now I'm building CureWise to be that revelation for everyone—to help every patient find their precise path to beating their unique cancer. We're creating the future where your cancer's genetic fingerprint becomes the map to its cure.

This isn't just another healthtech startup. This is personal. This is necessary. This is how we cure cancer—one unique patient at a time.