Q&A with Dr. Charlems Alvarez Jimenez: Creating an AI Tool to Personalize Rectal Cancer Treatment

One question on everyone’s mind recently: How can we use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve health care?

Charlems Alvarez Jimenez, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University, is focusing her career on biomedical and computer systems engineering to answer that question. Alvarez Jimenez received a 2024 PhRMA Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Translational Medicine for her work to develop a novel AI approach to predict treatment efficacy for rectal cancer patients.

Every year, more than 40,000 people are diagnosed with rectal cancer. Surgery to remove the cancer is the typical treatment route. Almost all patients receive presurgery treatment of radiation and/or chemotherapy to shrink the tumor.

For one in three of these patients, presurgery treatment eliminated their cancer, but they don’t know this until tissue is removed during the invasive surgery and tested. Currently, there are no reliable ways to tell how well presurgery treatment worked without examining removed tissue.

Alvarez Jimenez will create a new method to predict treatment efficacy by combining computer analysis of tissue sample images with information from MRI scans. This tool could lead to less invasive treatment options for rectal cancer patients in the future. Watch this video to learn about Alvarez Jimenez and her research.

Learn more about the PhRMA Foundation’s fellowship and grant opportunities. Check out more researcher stories on our blog.