San Diego · Medicine · Science · Technology

Michel Choueiri, MD

Physician, researcher, and founder.

I spent the first part of my career studying cancer. I’ve spent the second trying to build better ways to practice medicine.

Research Companies What I’m building now

2005–2014

Cancer first.

I trained in medicine and oncology, then worked across cancer biology, metastasis, targeted therapy, biomarkers, and genomics.

My research included prostate cancer, renal-cell carcinoma, colorectal cancer, and head and neck cancer. I worked at MD Anderson and later at UC San Diego, including the Ideker Lab.

That period taught me something I still think about constantly: medical evidence is useful only when you understand its limits.

Multi-tiered genomic analysis of head and neck cancer ties TP53 mutation to 3p lossNature Genetics
2014 ERCC1 and TS expression as prognostic and predictive biomarkers in metastatic colon cancerPLoS One
2015 The central role of osteoblasts in the metastasis of prostate cancerCancer and Metastasis Reviews
2006 Have molecularly targeted therapies improved overall survival in renal cell carcinoma?Current Oncology Reports
2011

All 15 publications

2014–present

Then I started building.

I became interested in the systems around medicine: how patients find expertise, how care gets delivered, and where technology actually helps.

PeerShip2014–2016

A peer-to-peer delivery marketplace. It didn’t become what I hoped it would. I learned a lot from it.

CancerDocs2016–2020

Built around a simple problem: specialized oncology knowledge is hard to reach when you need it.

CovidCheckToday2020–2023

Built during the pandemic, when access, logistics, and speed suddenly became part of healthcare itself.

Zappy Health2022–present

A larger experiment in consumer telehealth — and a much deeper education in operations, growth, trust, and care delivery.

2023–present

I’m working on Leny.

Medical knowledge has become too large and too fast-moving for any one person to hold in their head. AI changes what is possible — but access to more information is not the same as better judgment.

The problem I care about now is how to help patients and clinicians understand what evidence says, what applies to them, and how confident they should be.

The hard part isn’t finding more medical information. It’s knowing what to trust.

leny.ai

Things I think about.

Medicine

Evidence, uncertainty, clinical judgment, and why reasonable people can read the same study differently.

AI + science

What artificial intelligence changes about research, clinical reasoning, and access to expertise — and what it does not.

Building healthcare

What happens when product design, operations, regulation, incentives, and patient care collide.

Contact

Get in touch.

Please don’t send personal health information. This form isn’t a secure or HIPAA-compliant channel, I can’t give medical advice or discuss individual care through it, and writing to me doesn’t create a physician–patient relationship.

If you’re a patient, contact your care team directly. In an emergency, call 911.