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In June 2024, after losing yet another relative to liver cancer—just weeks after diagnosis—I decided to ask a simple but urgent question: Why aren’t cancers caught earlier, when something could still be done? This wasn’t the first loss. Too many of my extended family members had passed from cancer—often within weeks of their diagnosis. That pattern haunted me. What if early cancer detection could be as simple as a blood test—like how we screen for cholesterol or liver functio

We started with a feasibility study. With the help of cancer genomics expert Dr. Elena Tomas Bort, we surveyed public bisulfite sequencing datasets across various cancers. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) emerged as a compelling proof-of-concept—not only because of personal urgency, but because it lacks good screening standards today. Our team—including bioinformatics consultant Paul Gaudin—built a preprocessing pipeline to clean, align, and format raw sequencing data from mult