CerebraX wins Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’ Eighth District

When asked what inspired the creation of CerebraX, the students said, “The inspiration for CerebraX came from the troubling discovery of healthcare inequality in America. While researching cancer outcomes, we discovered that Glioblastoma patients at major academic centers, such as Johns Hopkins, have significantly better survival rates than those at community hospitals. This is not due to the use of different drugs, but rather to their access to sophisticated computational tools and comprehensive molecular testing, which most local hospitals cannot afford.

“This disparity has profound human consequences. GBM’s median survival is just 15 months, yet outcomes vary dramatically. While some patients survive less than six months, others get to live beyond three years. The difference lies in treatment personalization: matching therapy intensity to each patient’s unique tumor biology, performance status, and molecular markers. However, this precision does require analyzing complex factors that most physicians lack time to process during busy clinical schedules.

“Our technical inspiration came from aerospace engineering’s ‘digital twin’ technology. NASA created virtual spacecraft models to simulate scenarios before making real-world decisions. We realized this concept could be transferred to revolutionize cancer care: create a virtual patient, simulate treatment scenarios, predict outcomes with trained AI models, and identify optimal strategies before subjecting patients to potentially ineffective or toxic therapies blindly.

“Three major obstacles prevented existing solutions from helping most patients: commercial platforms cost $50,000-500,000 annually, out of range for community hospitals. Additionally, they required data formats incompatible with standard hospital systems. Their black box AI models didn’t explain recommendations, making physicians reluctant to trust how the treatment was derived.

“We envisioned CerebraX as an open, transparent, and affordable alternative, built on public but reliable datasets that use standard medical formats, and providing explainable AI that shows exactly why it chose certain treatments for each patient, whether that is to preserve safety or to increase efficiency.

“This project embodies our conviction that life-saving technology shouldn’t be a luxury for elite medical centers but rather a universal tool empowering every physician to provide precision medicine to every patient, regardless of their hospital’s resources or location.”