Andre Esteva is pioneering a future where AI can personalize therapies to improve health. “Doctors are the first to tell you they could use help with this,” Esteva says. The company he co-founded and leads as CEO, ArteraAI, has created an AI tool that predicts which prostate cancer treatment will work best for a patient. Prostate cancer is the second-most common cancer in men, and Esteva’s efforts became personal last year when his co-founder died of cancer at age 48. The AI is trained on images of tumors—detailed at the cellular level from more than 100,000 patients—and compares these patterns to an individual patient’s images to choose the right treatment option. The AI uses some additional patient information, but “98% of the signal comes from the tumor images,” Esteva says. In 2024, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, a nonprofit group of cancer centers that develops best practice guidelines, recommended the tool to cancer clinicians in the U.S., and ArteraAI has already helped nearly 20% of these clinicians integrate it into patient care, Esteva says. The tool was approved for Medicare reimbursement last year, and Esteva expects it will work for other cancer types in the next 12-18 months. “It will save many lives,” Esteva says.
Disclosure: TIME’s owners and co-chairs Marc and Lynne Benioff are investors in ArteraAI.