The National Cancer Institute (NCI) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to launch an upgraded version of NanCI – an app that serves a similar purpose to social media by allowing cancer researchers to connect with one another.
NanCI by NCI is a new mobile application that uses AI algorithms to match users’ interests and provide a unique experience by recommending tailored content such as people to connect with, events to attend, and interesting scientific papers.
According to NCI, “NanCI will help you stay informed about the science that excites you most while creating a professional network that can help you achieve your cancer research career goals.”
Oliver Bogler, the director of the Center for Cancer Training at NCI, said that NanCI is helping to address two key challenges in the cancer research area: the explosion of scientific papers in recent years, and connecting with peers.
“There are hundreds of papers published every day in the cancer field … so we have to find solutions that are at scale and that help our early career scientists stay oriented and current throughout their entire careers,” Bogler said during the Nextgov/FCW Health IT Workshop on Dec. 3. “Early career scientists struggle to make professional connections, to make meaningful, scientific connections – not just with mentors and ultimately mentees, but also with peers.”
“We are building a social network on the scientific literature, and of course, we’re leaning heavily into AI technologies to make those things work,” Bogler explained.
Currently, NanCI’s algorithm offers users recommendations on cancer research based off their bookmarked papers and interests. Users can also follow other users on the app and see the research they are currently studying – a feature Bogler compared to browsing your friend’s Spotify playlist.
“Our director of the NCI, director Dr. Kimryn Rathmell, who is an expert on renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is on the app, and she has made a folder on RCC and put about a dozen papers or so into it,” Bogler continued, “You can join the app and you can visit her profile, you can like her folder and see what she is reading in that domain. And that’s exciting because now you’re learning directly from a world expert on a topic.”
“In the new version that we’re working on – which we’re hoping to release in the next several months – you’ll also be able to get recommendations from the AI based on these folders from other users that you have liked,” Bogler said. “We’re really beginning to realize that dream of a social network on the literature where people can recommend things to each other.”
“And why are we doing this? Well, because if you ask scientists, how did you find the last really interesting paper you read, they might very well say, ‘Well, someone down the hall recommended it to me.’ And so, we want to capture that at scale in our app,” he said.
In the next version of the app, which will be available on the web and Android, Bogler said there will be an “ask NanCI” function where users will have the ability to interact with the papers.
Bogler explained that the next version of NanCI will also put the app’s recommendations for each user into a feed. It will also have the ability to tell that user why NanCI thinks they would be interested in that specific piece of research, and pre-load questions the user can ask to interact with the research based on their interests.
“Right away, just by seeing a new paper, you not only see the paper, [but also] you get an idea of why it’s in your in your feed, and you quickly get the chance to ask maybe the couple of questions that are really on your mind and see if the paper has something to offer you,” Bogler said. “So that’s one feature that we’re very excited about.”
NanCI will partner with Google to offer the latest AI technology – including the ability to summarize research papers into 10-minute podcasts for an easier way for users to digest the content.
The app will also suggest people in the cancer research community it thinks users should connect with.
Bogler said the end goal for NanCI would be to incorporate other data sources and scientific content throughout NIH so cancer researchers can have easy access to things like grants.
“In the end, we really hope to give you a more holistic presentation of a field – not just the papers, but the papers and other things,” Bolger said.
“For example, if you have a folder that mentions breast cancer … you might, in the future, not just get a new PubMed paper about that, or a Bio Archive paper, you might get a new grant that has just been funded by the NIH or the NCI on that or a new seminar … that is on that topic,” Bogler concluded. “We are going to enrich the content of [NanCI] in this way.”
