We Graduated from the Inaugural CancerX Accelerator. Here's What We Learned
Lind is now a graduate of the inaugural CancerX Accelerator. In a founder reflection, CEO Oggie Nikolic shares what working alongside Champion health systems taught the team and why EHR-embedded, disease-agnostic screening that adds zero work for coordinators became non-negotiable in Lind's product design.
By Oggie Nikolic, Co-founder & CEO of Lind
Today, Lind is officially a graduate of the inaugural CancerX Accelerator cohort. We walked into ViVE 2024 in Los Angeles as one of 16 startups selected for the program, and we’re walking out with a sharper product, stronger relationships, and some hard-won conviction about what it actually takes to move the needle on clinical trial access. Graduating felt less like a finish line and more like the moment the real work comes into focus.
For anyone unfamiliar: CancerX is a public-private partnership co-hosted by Moffitt Cancer Center and Advocate Health, launched in coordination with the White House Cancer Moonshot initiative. The goal is refreshingly concrete, cut the cancer death rate by 50% within 25 years, and the accelerator was built to find startups that could contribute to it, then give them direct access to health systems, mentors, and federal partners. Here’s what we took away.
The program and the cohort
The CancerX Accelerator, run in partnership with MassChallenge, selected 16 startups from more than 100 applicants, reviewed by over 70 judges. The cohort spanned the full arc of cancer care — from early detection, like Oatmeal Health and its AI-powered lung cancer screening, to survivorship tools like SurvivorPlan, to clinical operations, which is where we sit.
What made the program work was its anchors. Nine Champion organizations, UC Davis Health, Atrium, Debiopharm, Reveal HealthTech, Dell Technologies, Intel, AstraZeneca, AWS, and Oncology Ventures weren’t passive sponsors. They committed to working sessions, pilot discussions, and in some cases real contracting conversations with the startups they were matched with. More than 60 mentors from the broader CancerX community filled in around them.
One detail I keep coming back to: over half of the cohort’s founders identified as BIPOC, women, or first-time entrepreneurs. That matters in oncology, where the communities most underrepresented in clinical trials are too often the same communities underrepresented among the people building the solutions. If you want trials to reach everyone, it helps to have builders who reflect everyone.
This was not a networking exercise
CancerX was not simply an exercise in networking, although there was a lot of that as well, but success here is measured by outcomes. By graduation, startups across the cohort had secured four or more definitive contracts, signed three letters of intent, and influenced two investment decisions. Collectively, founders logged more than 50 meetings with frontline healthcare workers: coordinators, oncologists, nurse navigators, research administrators. These weren’t pitch meetings. These were working sessions with the people who actually run trials, day in and day out. For us, those conversations were the whole point. You can’t build infrastructure for clinical research from the outside. You have to sit with the coordinator who has 40 charts to review before lunch and watch where the process breaks.
What it did to our product thinking
We came in with a strong thesis: clinical trial matching should be automated, disease-agnostic, and embedded in the EHR. Working alongside Champion health systems through the program didn’t change that thesis. It sharpened it into three things we now treat as non-negotiable.
The first is that screening has to live inside the EHR, not next to it. Every coordinator we spoke with had the same reaction to standalone portals, they don’t use them. If matches don’t appear inside the system clinicians already live in, adoption is dead on arrival. So we doubled down on native integration as the only viable deployment model.
The second is that the platform has to be disease-agnostic from day one. Health systems don’t run only lung trials or only breast trials; they run dozens to hundreds of studies across oncology and beyond. A tool that needs configuration per disease area recreates the exact bottleneck it’s supposed to remove. Lind screens across the full trial landscape with no disease-specific setup.
The third, and the one we heard most consistently, is that the platform must add zero work for coordinators. These teams are already stretched. Anything that asks them to enter data, re-review charts, or learn a new interface loses to the status quo — which is doing nothing. So Lind runs overnight, autonomously, and delivers a prioritized list by morning. The coordinator’s job is to review and act, not to operate the system.
What we shipped
The program wasn’t only about learning, we built alongside the sponsor organizations. Working with Champion organizations gave us a live environment to pressure-test the platform against real workflows and real data constraints.
We validated our nightly batch screening model: coordinators confirmed that an overnight run delivering a ranked match list by morning fits how research teams actually work, and that no one wanted real-time alerts interrupting clinic hours. We stress-tested disease-agnostic matching across multiple oncology departments inside the same system, which confirmed that per-disease configuration is a dead end at scale. And we refined our integration approach, direct feedback from health-system IT teams reshaped how we think about EHR connectivity, data-access patterns, and the security review every health system requires before going live.
What we’re carrying forward
CancerX gave us something hard to manufacture: repeated, structured access to the people who will use our platform and the executives who will buy it. That combination, clinical reality plus institutional decision-making is what turns a good product into a deployed one.
We’re now in clinical validation work with health-system partners, and the question is simple: can automated, nightly screening increase the number of patients identified for trials without increasing coordinator workload? If we can prove that consistently, the deployment model scales itself.
I’m grateful to the CancerX team, to MassChallenge, and especially to the Atrium Health who gave us their time and their honest feedback. The Cancer Moonshot set a deadline to cut the cancer death rate in half within 25 years. That isn’t aspirational language. It’s a constraint. And constraints are where good engineering starts.
We’ll share results from our validation work as they come in.