MIT Professor Leverages Machine Learning to Find Promising Cancer Treatments

When his father was diagnosed with stage IV, non-operable gastric cancer in 2007, Dr. Dimitris Bertsimas knew that combination chemotherapy was the best course of treatment. He visited several of the leading cancer hospitals in the nation--Dana Farber, Massachusetts General, MD Anderson and Memorial Sloan Kettering--to see what specific therapies they would propose for his father. "They each told me very distinct therapies, almost with no drugs in common," says Bertsimas. "I didn't know how to compare them." So Bertsimas, who is a professor of operational research at MIT did a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation.