We’re changing the future of cancer for everyone.

Our story

Uncharted began with a death sentence.

In 2018 Chris Gregg was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic cancer and given 24 months to live.

Like every other patient with a stage 4 cancer considered to be incurable, Chris was told that there was nothing to be done, that he could be kept alive for a year or two with chemotherapy and radiation treatments, but that was it. His cancer was incurable and terminal.

It was a death sentence.

Like every other patient, when Chris heard the words “cancer” and “terminal”, the ground was ripped away from under him. His compassionate oncologist kept talking, explaining what would happen next… but Chris heard none of it. His life was at an end. His children would be left fatherless, his wife would lose her husband, and there was nothing that anyone could do to change that single, inevitable outcome.

Like every other patient, Chris would be dead in under two years.

But Chris was not exactly like every other patient.

Chris Gregg PhD, is a tenured professor and principal investigator at the University of Utah School of Medicine in both the Neurobiology and Genetics departments. He’s a world-leading expert in genomics, epigenomics and deep phenotypic analyses of complex behavior patterns. He was an early innovator in the genomics revolution at Harvard. He’s a recipient of the Eppendorf & Science Prize in Neurobiology and the NYSCF Robertson-Neuroscience Investigator award. His work has been selected as a top breakthrough of the year by the NIMH in 2010 and again in 2018 by STAT. He’d published papers on cancer. He’s the Chief Scientific Officer of Storyline Health, the worlds most advanced behavioral research platform.

And he’s Canadian, so everyone likes him.

After weeks of the inevitable self reflection and depression that every diagnosis like this brings, Chris did what perhaps no other cancer patient could have done - what no one else on Earth may have been able to do.

He started reading.

Chris read every recent study and peer-reviewed paper that held promise for treating cancer. Then he read all of the old ones. And, because of his expertise and background, he was able to understand not only what the summaries claimed, but how valid the underlying ideas, science, and findings were. He could weigh the claims, and see how they might work together and why they might be working at all. He welded together promising cancer theories and new insights from different areas of healthcare, being brutally careful to avoid hyperbole and hope, and focus only on proof and an understanding of the underlying biology.

No bullshit. No hopeful fluff. Just provable science.

Science that could be used right now to drive immediate results.

There were studies on drugs and radiation therapies. There were papers on mice, and monkeys, and sharks, and elephants. There were findings on the effects of diet, and sleep, breathing, blood oxygen, and hyperthermia. There were findings from the leading institutions, labs, companies, and researchers around the world.

Then there were phone calls. Lots of phone calls.

Chris’s position and reputation allowed him to send and email or make a phone call and get an almost immediate response from anyone, working on anything, anywhere on Earth.

The days stretched into months.

Diet, temperature, oxygen saturation, ph values, sleep… there were studies on everything… everything that could be a potential key seemed to be out there, but there was no plan - no central scientific strategy or position that could tie everything together. It was a hodgepodge of siloed research looking at only part of the problem, and finding only part of the solution.

The system works well if you are a drug company.

Academic labs and researchers need funding to do science, and much of that funding comes from pharmaceutical companies.

It seemed all of the cancer studies were funded by pharmaceutical companies trying to prove a new drug to take to market. They had the deep pockets that funded the university research labs and clinical trials. They sucked up every cancer patient they could for their studies. Few researchers had an interest to work on areas where funding was scarce and there was no billion dollar drug at the end.

That is a big part of the problem.

The entire cancer research ecosystem is targeted towards finding a new drug to sell.

It was beyond frustrating because Chris was aware of another single and immutable fact: There will never be a drug that can cure cancer.

The Reality of Cancer

Cancer drugs are only effective until the cancer develops resistance to the drug… and cancers ALWAYS develop resistance to the drug.

Always. Every time. Always.

‘Remission’, only means that the drug has been temporarily effective in reducing the cancer and made it undetectable by our current tools. It’s still there, and it will come back. Our current technologies and tests just can’t determine accurately when that will be.

That single fact — that cancer always becomes resistant — means that the “silver bullet” drug to cure cancer will never exist, because the cancer will always adapt and develop a resistance to that drug over time.

Every time. Always.

Of course everyone already knows this. In fact, it’s so well understood that it’s called ‘standard of care’, and it’s why Chris’s diagnosis was terminal. This ‘standard care’ model is so reliable that oncologists are extremely accurate in predicting their patients drug and disease progression, and their death.

Chris’s treatment plan would look like every other cancer patient. He would be put on a chemotherapy drug continuously at what is called the Maximum Tolerable Dose (TAM). When the drug stopped being effective — as it always did — he would be switched to a new drug. When the available drugs for his cancer were exhausted, there would be no further way to hold off or control the cancer and it would explode, unchecked.

Everyone knew exactly when and how Chris would die.

As a patient, Chris was helpless.

Like every other cancer patient, Chris had no access to information about his disease progression beyond what his oncologist could cram into a 10 minute discussion at the end of an appointment. The fact that Chris’s wonderful oncologist was extremely caring and wanted to spend more time to help couldn’t change the fact that there were other anxious patients stacking up in the waiting room, all wanting information and explanations, and seeking comfort and hope.

There would never be enough time.

The internet was little help. Information was scarce beyond the most superficial definitions and terms posted on a healthcare website. Worse, the snake-oil hokum and click-bait of endless ‘cancer cures’ obscured much of the real science showing actions that can actually make a difference.

It was an endless morass of dead ends and junk science. There were no answers. There were no real actions to take. There was no science to understand.

Researchers work on problems that they can get funding for. Oncologists are taught that cancer is incurable and that any deviation from standard of care is unthinkable - all of their advanced cancer patients are terminal and that they need to be careful because grieving families often look for someone to blame. Drug companies who fund the system are looking for the next breakthrough drug to take to market.

It’s a grotesque maze of perverse financial incentives, defensive medicine, money guided research, and unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.

The result is a broken system where patients have no power — where cancer patients are the product.

Patients don’t own their information. They don’t get to decide what trials they know about or have access to. They’re never informed or educated enough to move beyond blind trust and hope that someone really is looking out for them.

After developing a deep understand of the current system, Chris became deeply cynical.

He now understood why it takes an average of 17 years for a new medical discovery to move from the lab into clinical care.

For any patient it is frustrating beyond belief.

For Chris, it was intolerable.

But then, something truly remarkable happened.

The first tiny glimmer of light came when Chris discovered a few researchers working with mathematical models at the junction of evolutionary biology and cancer at Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida. They were building mathematical models that took learning from different areas like evolutionary biology, species extinctions, and agriculture and applied that knowledge to cancer.

And it wasn’t just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.

They had data.

And they weren’t alone.

Chris found a small, motivated group of thought-leading researchers in different parts of the country who were uncovering a completely new way of looking at cancer. How it worked. How it evolved and adapted. It’s strengths, and the potential to uncover new weaknesses.

Chris was connecting with other researchers and clinicians who were working in promising areas where there were proven, dramatic effects on patient outcomes. Areas like diet, where the effects on cancer cells rivaled chemotherapy, like temperature changes to keep cancer cells active and killable, and blood oxygen levels that could stress individual cancer cells and make them easier to kill with drugs.

For Chris, it was moment of recognition and understanding — and he was already putting the pieces together.

It was fall of 2019.

Chris got on the phone again, this time calling with a specific ask.

Chris called thought-leading oncologists and researchers, asking them to come to the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute for a symposium on cancer.

Incredibly, they came.

Cancer researchers came from around the country. Oncology leaders who’s schedules were booked years in advance, who were chained to their practice or research lab, recognized the opportunity, dropped everything, and flew to Utah to talk.

Then spent two days sharing thoughts, information, and data.

Patient Zero

For Chris, a transformative new plan began to emerge.

A plan that offered hope that his stage 4 metastatic cancer would not be the death sentence that everyone thought. It would take everything he’d uncovered and learned, and forge it into a new, comprehensive system of care. A plan based on deep understanding of the foundational science that could build a bridge to transforming cancer from a terminal disease into a chronic condition, perhaps even a cure.

It would not be standard care. It would not be an acceptance of the status quo. It would not be giving up and meekly accepting death.

There was going to be a fight.

It would be an attempt to prove that there is a path of hope for advanced cancer patients where there was no hope before, and Chris would be patient zero.

Following this new plan, Chris moved from “standard care” which had shown no progress, to “No Evidence of Disease” (NED) within 5 months.

And he’s stayed there since that day.

His goal - and that of his oncologist, care team, and the researchers working with him - is a cure.

Not a bogus “broccoli cures cancer” or “think positive” or “saw it on Facebook” cure, but a real cure based on the latest science, overseen by thought-leading scientists and clinicians, using existing drugs.

There’s good reason to think it might be.

Uncharted Territory

At first, the plan was to get pharmaceutical companies to implement clinical trials and prove out this new therapy.

We were naïve enough to think that possibly curing cancer would bring foundations, pharma, and researchers together.

We were wrong of course.

The pharmaceutical ecosystem is built around new drug discovery. Since there were no new drugs there was little support. University researchers were open, but they can’t turn down the pharma money. Moreover, we knew that it would take years of fundraising, animal research, and clinical trials just to get going. (Not to mention the egos, turf wars, and politics.)

At the same time, the successes of this new treatment plan began to spread. Chris was being contacted by patients who were in advanced stages of cancer, and they wanted help. They wanted this information — a plan was built on proven science and research and offered hope where there was none.

It posed a number of ethical considerations.

Could we ethically withhold this information? Could we let people die when we were aware of proven, rational science that could help them improve their quality of life and clinical outcome?

No.

So we started on another plan. A plan that would put patients first, not financial interests. A plan that would organize and empower those patients with a library of scientifically rational education and actions curated and overseen by experts.

A plan oncologists could trust to provide comprehensive cancer education in ways that they could not before, making their patients active partners in their own care.

A plan that resulted in better quality of life, and improved clinical outcomes.

It would mean engaging and educating tens of thousands of cancer patients about what was now possible. It would require a community where patients were empowered to make decisions, proactively engage in their care, and improve their lives and outcomes.

It wouldn’t be easy.

It would require a revolution against the status-quo.

So we got to work, bringing together people to change the future of cancer. It would take patients and volunteers. It would take foundations and nonprofits. It would take philanthropists and forward thinking companies.

And, quite possibly, it will take you.

We envision a world where it doesn’t take 17 years to move a cancer discovery to clinical care.

We’re working to change cancer in 3 years.

That’s our mission.

To do it will be a miracle.

We've already been a part of some incredible stories. We’ve built a world class scientific and oncology board. We’ve built the systems to provide reliable scientific information and education. We’ve created new areas of research and discover to move past the roadblocks of the status quo. We’ve helped new cancer patients understand their illness and care for the first time.

Drugs, diet, environment, sleep, temperature, behaviors… Patients are using the understanding and knowledge they’ve gained from Uncharted to help themselves and their families. And oncologists are telling patients about us, too.

Patient’s don’t need another website or false hope. They need a real plan — a way to take actions that can help them immediately. A plan that can improve their quality of life, and their clinical outcome today — right now.

So we built Uncharted to provide a path forward, so that every oncologist and caregiver can use it to make their patients lives better.

And while Uncharted is about incredible research, and education, and clinical trials, and usable information… it's mostly about the miracle.

Join us.