From Wildfire to CureWise: How AI Helped Me Catch, Treat, and Reimagine Cancer Care
A missed diagnosis, a swarm of AI agents, and the story behind CureWise on the Neuron AI Explained podcast
When the Neuron AI Explained team, Corey Nolles and Grant Harvey, invited me onto their podcast, I knew the conversation would get personal. In this episode, I talk about how a wildfire destroyed my home, pushed me into a new hospital, and set off the chain of events that revealed an aggressive blood cancer doctors had missed.
The show walks through how I built a swarm of 36 AI agents to analyze my medical data from different perspectives. This was not about replacing doctors. It was about using AI to coach me on what to ask in those short, ten minute conversations with an oncologist. In practice, that meant catching the missed signals in my blood work, flagging the right tests, and surfacing treatment paths tied to the genetics of my cancer.
We also cover the small details that make a big difference. A pharmacist told me to take the drug with food. The AI told me to take it with 40 grams of fat. That subtle correction changed my results. Multiply that by thousands of hidden details in medical records and you start to see the potential.
The conversation is not just personal. It is also about the future of healthcare. We talk about privacy, since survival usually outranks data concerns for cancer patients. We talk about regulation, since “better than today” matters more than waiting for perfect. And we talk about what CureWise is building: a patient-first platform that curates medical records, routes them to specialized agents, and synthesizes the answers into something you can actually use with your doctor.
The episode closes with a round robin question. What will healthcare look like in three years, once AI handles the things humans do poorly or too slowly? My view is simple. If we let it, AI can reduce the guesswork, accelerate treatments, and give patients a fighting chance they might otherwise never get.
This podcast captures the whole arc, from personal crisis to building CureWise, and why I believe AI belongs at the center of precision medicine.
—Steve Brown, Founder and CEO, CureWise
The t(11;14) cancers have a well-defined starting point, with a single, recognizable driver mutation present in all initial cancer cells. Prostate cancer, like many other solid tumors, is more genetically complex (heterogeneity) from the start. However, both cancers evolve as they progress. The key to a durable response lies in the ability to anticipate and manage the genetic heterogeneity that develops over time in response to the drugs used, which leads to drug resistance. I would love to hear about how CureWise addresses evolving genetic mutations in response to treatment, which can cause drug resistance. This is incredibly common with prostate cancer.