“Our goal was very clear from the beginning, which was to develop a user-friendly simple chat-like interface that would provide specific high-quality answers to questions that our members would bring, utilizing only our content,” said Clifford A. Hudis, CEO of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and executive vice chair of the Conquer Cancer Foundation.

On this week’s episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Hudis spoke with Paul Goldberg, publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, about his guest editorial, “ASCO and Google Cloud set forth a vision for using AI to modernize health care and advance oncology.”

Hudis co-wrote the article with Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.

In the episode, Hudis, Jacquelyn, and Paul talk about the collaboration between the American Society of Clinical Oncology and Google Cloud to develop an AI tool to better access ASCO’s guidelines—and how to do so safely and ethically.

“This required tuning the AI tool, in this case, to do essentially two things. And I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it, but number one, it restricted its answering to only our source documents. It couldn't look elsewhere,” said Hudis. “Number two, it was tuned towards facts and away from creativity. And there is a lot of technical background to this, but my understanding therefore is that tunes down the likelihood of it inventing an answer and makes it more reliant on facts. And then number three, and the biggest innovation I think for us at the time, was understanding that clinicians ultimately are absolutely responsible for whatever they do to patients.”

Hudis said that ultimately, the problem that was solved wasn’t the one he was anticipating. 

“We thought we were solving this utilitarian access to the data problem,” he said. “But, I think in the end, the problem we're solving is building trust and support in our community to embrace this new technology, which, as I'm sure we'll talk about, I think is going to be ubiquitous, nearly universal.”

Other stories mentioned in this podcast include:

• Under the lens: Taking a close look at the NIH and FDA declarations on animal-based research

• How animal testing became a MAHA political wedge issue: While cancer scientists say NIH, FDA moves are premature, animal rights advocates say changes aren’t drastic enough

• Study finds no correlation between cancer burden in catchment areas and cancer centers’ CCSG funding

A transcript of this podcast is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20251022-cliffordhudis/