In a significant advancement for precision oncology, ConcertAI, a leading AI and real-world data company focused on cancer care, has fundamentally transformed CancerLinQ, a platform initially launched by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) over a decade ago. Acquired by ConcertAI in December 2023, CancerLinQ has evolved from a tool primarily used for automated quality measure reporting into a sophisticated, AI-powered point-of-care oncology intelligence system, designed to bridge the persistent chasm between routine clinical practice and cutting-edge cancer research. This strategic evolution marks a critical step towards realizing a true learning healthcare system in oncology, where every patient encounter contributes to a deeper understanding of cancer and informs more effective, personalized treatment decisions.
The Genesis of CancerLinQ: ASCO’s Vision for a Learning System
The journey of CancerLinQ began in the early 2010s, driven by ASCO’s ambitious vision to revolutionize cancer care through data. Recognizing the vast potential of electronic health record (EHR) data, ASCO sought to create a platform that could aggregate de-identified patient information from diverse oncology practices across the United States. The goal was to transform the fragmented data generated during routine patient care into a cohesive, dynamic learning system. This system aimed to identify patterns, evaluate treatment effectiveness, and ultimately improve the quality of care delivered to cancer patients nationwide. At its core, CancerLinQ was conceived as a non-profit initiative to help oncologists measure and improve their performance against established quality standards and facilitate a better understanding of cancer care in the real world.
Despite its noble intentions and significant investment, CancerLinQ, prior to its acquisition, faced inherent challenges common to large-scale data aggregation projects within a complex healthcare ecosystem. Its most widely adopted function, as noted by Eron Kelly, ConcertAI’s chief executive, was the automated reporting necessary for ASCO certification quality measures. "Before we bought it, CancerLinQ largely just delivered software that automated the measurement of ASCO certification quality measures, in order to get your ASCO certification," Kelly explained. While valuable for quality assurance and practice improvement, this utility only scratched the surface of the platform’s potential as a comprehensive oncology intelligence system. The sheer volume and heterogeneity of oncology data, coupled with the complexities of integrating disparate EHR systems and extracting meaningful insights, posed considerable hurdles to unlocking its full capabilities for real-time clinical decision support and research acceleration.
ConcertAI’s Strategic Acquisition and Transformative Leap
The acquisition of CancerLinQ by ConcertAI in December 2023 was a pivotal moment, signaling a new era for the platform. ConcertAI, an established leader in leveraging AI and real-world data to accelerate therapeutic development and improve patient outcomes in oncology, saw in CancerLinQ a robust foundation upon which to build a truly integrated and intelligent system. The company’s expertise in developing sophisticated AI models and its deep understanding of real-world evidence (RWE) generation positioned it uniquely to fulfill CancerLinQ’s initial promise and expand its utility exponentially.
Post-acquisition, ConcertAI embarked on an aggressive transformation strategy. The company’s immediate focus was to move CancerLinQ far beyond its initial role as a quality-measure automation tool. This involved integrating advanced AI capabilities to enhance data processing, interpretation, and the delivery of actionable insights directly into physicians’ workflows. The core of this transformation lies in ConcertAI’s proprietary AI engine, which employs a "chain of AI models and agents" to parse and interpret vast amounts of complex, unstructured clinical information. As Kelly elaborated, these models are designed to "understand really challenging concepts like progression, or timelines within a diagnosis journey, and summarize that into a structured data model that can be queried from our SaaS software stack." This sophisticated AI architecture enables the system to extract nuanced information from physician notes, pathology reports, genomic sequencing results, and other clinical documents, converting it into a standardized, queryable format that powers the platform’s advanced features.
The revitalized CancerLinQ now incorporates critical functionalities such as AI-powered trial-matching, generation of comprehensive research datasets, and intelligent clinical decision support. This suite of tools is designed not only to automate tasks but also to actively guide oncologists, offering real-time recommendations and insights based on the latest evidence and the patient’s unique clinical profile.
Bridging the Care-Research Divide with AI
A central tenet of ConcertAI’s strategy is to effectively close the gap between routine clinical care and clinical research—a divide that often limits patient access to the most innovative therapies. Dr. Shaalan Beg, ConcertAI’s chief medical officer for oncology, underscored this imperative, particularly in diseases where therapeutic landscapes are rapidly evolving. He highlighted that in such dynamic fields, the most current and effective treatment options are frequently accessible only through participation in clinical trials.
Dr. Beg cited a recent example: ASCO data presented just days prior to the interview revealed a new multi-selective RAS inhibitor nearly doubling the median survival for patients with previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, from approximately six months to twelve months. "If you’re a pancreatic cancer patient right now and you want the best standard of care," Beg stated, "the only way you’re going to get it is through clinical trials." This stark reality underscores the urgency of efficiently connecting eligible patients with relevant trials. The enhanced CancerLinQ platform is engineered precisely for this purpose, leveraging AI to identify potential trial candidates from routine clinical data, thereby accelerating enrollment and ensuring patients have access to potentially life-extending therapies.
The burgeoning field of healthcare AI has seen a rapid increase in companies focusing on transforming aggregated clinical data into actionable intelligence. ConcertAI operates within a competitive landscape that includes other prominent players like Flatiron Health, Tempus, and Komodo Health, all striving to leverage real-world data and AI to improve healthcare outcomes. What distinguishes ConcertAI, according to Dr. Beg, is its platform’s unique agnosticism across all EHR vendors and genomic/molecular laboratories. This vendor-agnostic approach allows CancerLinQ to collect longitudinal, prospective data from a vast array of sources, providing an unparalleled breadth and depth of insights for both clinical care and research. This comprehensive data integration is crucial for generating truly representative real-world evidence and ensuring that AI-driven insights are applicable across diverse clinical settings.
AI as "Lane Assist" for Oncology Workflows
The integration of AI into clinical practice has witnessed a dramatic surge in recent years. Data from the American Medical Association (AMA) illustrates this rapid adoption: in 2023, 38% of physicians reported incorporating AI in one or more cases, a figure that soared to 72% by 2026. Physician awareness of AI also saw a significant increase, rising from 66% in 2025 to 81% in 2026. This growing acceptance and utilization highlight a readiness within the medical community for sophisticated tools that can augment their capabilities.
Dr. Beg employs a compelling self-driving car analogy to describe the role of AI within ConcertAI’s transformed CancerLinQ: "For most of the clinical care doctors are asking for right now, it’s more like lane assist, keeping the car in its lane and giving nudges along the way." These "nudges" are not autonomous decisions but rather intelligent prompts that assist oncologists in navigating complex care pathways. Examples include flagging "care gaps" – such as a missing molecular data point for a colon cancer patient – or proactively suggesting relevant clinical trials. The AMA’s research corroborates this sentiment, indicating that physician use and enthusiasm for AI tools predominantly cluster around documentation and summarization. Summaries of research and standards of care now represent the single most common AI use case, accounting for nearly 40% of applications, a 26-point increase since 2024, with documentation tools close behind in terms of clinician enthusiasm.
This "lane assist" philosophy is rooted in a pragmatic understanding of AI’s current capabilities and the realities of modern oncology. "We’re not working under the assumption that these tools will autonomously care for patients," Dr. Beg affirmed. Instead, the primary objective is to alleviate the immense capacity pressure confronting oncologists today. The era of a single physician comprehensively managing all aspects of a cancer patient’s needs is long past, replaced by a multidisciplinary approach involving oncologists, nurse practitioners, geneticists, dietitians, and physical therapists. Coordinating care across these specialists, particularly within understaffed programs and clinical trial offices, presents a significant challenge. Dr. Beg noted, "I don’t know of any academic program or clinical trials office that says it’s fully staffed." Against this backdrop, AI tools function as an efficiency layer, designed to give oncologists back precious minutes per patient, thereby enabling them to oversee a greater number of cases without compromising quality.
Revolutionizing Clinical Trials and Precision Medicine
One of the most profound impacts of the transformed CancerLinQ is its ability to revolutionize clinical trial matching. Manual patient screening for trials is notoriously time-consuming and inefficient, often requiring research coordinators to scour patient charts for dozens of eligibility criteria. ConcertAI’s system can compress this screening time to less than a third of what manual processes require. When a patient is flagged as a probable match, the AI system automatically evaluates 20 to 30 criteria, states its eligibility determination for each, and crucially, links directly back to the source documentation within the patient’s record. This seamless integration eliminates the need for coordinators to manually search through separate windows or physical charts, dramatically streamlining the workflow. Furthermore, this capability extends the reach of clinical trials to patients in satellite clinics or hub-and-spoke setups, ensuring that geographical location does not become a barrier to accessing potentially life-saving research.
Underpinning these advanced point-of-care capabilities and rapid trial matches is ConcertAI’s robust data engine. This engine ingests both structured EHR fields and a wealth of unstructured clinical content directly from sites across the CancerLinQ network. This includes invaluable data sources such as physician notes, pathology reports, and genomic/Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) laboratory reports. The ingested data is then continuously processed and refreshed, resulting in a structured dataset that is updated weekly, ensuring that the insights provided to clinicians are always current and relevant.
Ensuring Trust and Accuracy: The Layered AI Approach
The efficacy of any AI system in healthcare hinges on trust. Clinicians must have absolute confidence that the insights provided are accurate and clinically coherent. ConcertAI addresses this critical concern through a sophisticated, layered validation process. As Eron Kelly explained, their "chain of AI models and agents" not only parses and summarizes information but also incorporates cross-checking mechanisms. One layer of agents measures abstraction accuracy, verifying that the AI correctly interprets and extracts information from the chart. Another layer assesses coherence, ensuring that the sequence of events and proposed treatments make clinical sense, flagging, for instance, a treatment that would not typically follow a particular radiation regimen. This multi-layered validation ensures high precision and recall, with Kelly reporting performance metrics of "0.9 and higher in precision and recall," instilling confidence in the system’s reliability.
This meticulous approach to data integrity has tangible benefits for patient care, particularly in the context of evolving diagnostic criteria and targeted therapies. Because ConcertAI retains access to underlying pathology reports, the system can identify patients whose tumors were characterized years ago under older guidelines but would now qualify for newer, more effective targeted therapies. A compelling example is the evolution of HER2 testing in breast cancer. Historically, patients with HER2 expression scored as "1+" were considered HER2-negative. However, with the advent of HER2-targeted antibody-drug conjugates that demonstrate efficacy even at low expression levels, these patients are now reclassified as HER2-positive under current criteria. CancerLinQ can proactively identify these patients, bringing them back into consideration for treatments that were previously unavailable or deemed unsuitable, thereby ensuring they receive the most current and effective care.
From "Moonshots" to "Ground Shots": A Practical Vision for Oncology
The narrative of cancer treatment has long been dominated by the allure of "moonshots" – ambitious, sweeping quests for a definitive cure, a dream that has captivated the popular imagination since President Nixon’s War on Cancer in the early 1970s and continues with initiatives like the federal Cancer Moonshot. While monumental breakthroughs such as checkpoint-inhibitor immunotherapy, CAR-T cell therapies for blood cancers, and targeted drugs like imatinib have punctuated this long journey, most progress in oncology has come incrementally. Gains are often measured in better-targeted therapies, refined biomarkers, and additional months of survival.
While "moonshots" undeniably play a vital role in inspiring and funding groundbreaking research, Dr. Beg articulated a more immediate, ground-up philosophy. He advocates for a focus on "ground shots first, disseminating the treatments we already know work to the people who need them right now." This perspective champions the practical application of existing knowledge and proven therapies, ensuring that the benefits of scientific advancement reach patients efficiently and equitably. ConcertAI’s transformed CancerLinQ platform embodies this philosophy. By leveraging AI to close care gaps, streamline trial matching, and provide real-time clinical decision support, the platform is designed to maximize the impact of current oncology knowledge, translating incremental gains into tangible improvements in patient outcomes across the broad spectrum of cancer care.
The journey of CancerLinQ, from ASCO’s initial vision to ConcertAI’s AI-driven transformation, illustrates a powerful paradigm shift in oncology. It represents a move towards a data-driven, intelligent ecosystem where technology serves as a force multiplier, enhancing the capabilities of clinicians, accelerating research, and ultimately ensuring that every cancer patient has access to the most advanced and personalized care available. The ongoing evolution of CancerLinQ under ConcertAI’s stewardship promises to continue redefining the landscape of oncology, delivering both "ground shots" and contributing to the pursuit of future "moonshots" in the fight against cancer.
