Live from ASCO 2026: Cancer Diary, Digital Health, and the Latest in Oncology Research

I'm here at the ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) Annual Meeting. In a place where oncologists, researchers, and patient advocates from around the world gather, I walked the floor between booths and sessions with three goals in mind.

First, to hear what people in actual clinical settings think about the Cancer Diary we're building. Second, to gather information on what's happening where digital health meets cancer and chemotherapy. Third, to study, firsthand, the latest clinical trials and research methods in Pancreatic Cancer, Biliary Tract Cancer, and single-cell techniques.

1. Asking People Directly About the Cancer Diary

As someone who builds technology, my greatest fear is to elegantly build something the field doesn't actually want. So this time I came with questions instead of slides.

The Cancer Diary lets patients undergoing chemotherapy record their daily symptoms, medication, condition, and emotions — and connects that data to their care team. I showed this idea to medical oncologists, nurses, and patient-advocacy representatives, and asked what they thought.

Here's what I heard, over and over:

• "Recording must not become a burden — for the patient or the care team." Input should be light; the structuring should be automatic.
• "Symptom trends have to be visible at a glance to be useful during a visit." Not just a diary, but a clinically legible summary.
• "Evidence linking PRO (Patient-Reported Outcomes) data to survival keeps accumulating." Recording isn't just for comfort — it can change outcomes.

In particular, studies showing that PRO-based symptom monitoring reduces ER visits and improves quality of life and survival were cited again and again at ASCO. The direction the Cancer Diary should take became much clearer.

2. Digital Health × Cancer: What's Changing

Here's the throughline I gathered across sessions and booths.

• Standardization of remote symptom monitoring: not one-off apps, but tools that connect to the EMR and live inside the care workflow.
• AI-based toxicity prediction: tools that anticipate chemotherapy side effects in advance to support dose adjustment and proactive response.
• Patients own their data: a model where patients hold the data they record and actively use it for care and clinical-trial matching.

The common thread is clear: technology survives only when it dissolves into the real paths of patients and clinicians, not as a flashy demo. It's the same principle we hold onto while building the Cancer Diary.

3. What I Came to Study: Pancreatic, Biliary Tract, Single-cell

These were the tracks I followed most closely at this ASCO.

Pancreatic Cancer

Still a cancer with a difficult prognosis — but there are signs of change.

• KRAS-targeted therapy: next-generation inhibitors and pan-RAS strategies aimed at mutations once considered "undruggable," including G12D.
• Cancer vaccines / immune approaches: efforts to reduce post-surgical recurrence, including personalized mRNA vaccines.
• Early-detection biomarkers: because it's so often caught late, the importance of blood-based early-diagnosis research.

Biliary Tract Cancer

A prime example of a cancer where molecular classification is genuinely changing treatment.

• Precision-medicine approaches to targetable alterations such as FGFR2 fusions, IDH1 mutations, and HER2.
• The establishment of immunotherapy + chemotherapy combinations in first-line treatment.
• Which makes comprehensive genomic profiling (NGS) all the more important — molecular testing now determines the treatment options.

Single-cell Technique

The most fascinating part on the research-methodology side.

• Dissecting the tumor microenvironment cell by cell with single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and spatial transcriptomics.
• Why some patients respond to immunotherapy and others don't — an attempt to explain that heterogeneity at the cellular level.
• As single-cell data grows, so does the role of the AI / computational tools that interpret it. This is exactly where digital health meets basic research.

Closing Thoughts

The ASCO floor confirmed two things at once: cancer treatment is becoming ever more precise — down to the molecule, down to the cell — and at the same time, there is an urgent need for tools that connect and read all that data between patients and clinicians.

I hope the Cancer Diary can become more than a simple logging app: a way to turn a patient's everyday into clinically meaningful data, and ultimately a bridge connecting patients to the very research and clinical trials described above.

Thank you to everyone who shared honest opinions on the floor. And I'm curious what you think, too. I'll keep sharing the stories I bring back from ASCO.