KRAS Kickers on AI, Trust and Trial Search at WCLC 2026
Updated: 3 days ago
KRAS Kickers on AI, Trust and Trial Search at WCLC 2026
Chris Conneran was invited by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer to speak at the 2026 World Conference on Lung Cancer in Seoul, South Korea, bringing the KRAS Kickers perspective to an international discussion on artificial intelligence in cancer care.
On September 13, he joined the educational session AI in Lung Cancer Care: Implementation, Equity, and Global Perspectives, where he shared insights shaped by business, technology, advocacy, and lived experience as a cancer care partner.
His presentation focused on trust, transparency, privacy, communication, and patient empowerment as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into cancer care. The KRAS Kickers Trial Finder provided a practical example of how those principles can be applied to AI technology designed for patients.
Chris is a technology leader with three decades of information technology experience, he brought a perspective shaped by business, technology, advocacy, and lived experience as a cancer care partner. Those perspectives come together around a central question: how can technology advance cancer care while protecting transparency, privacy, trust, and patient empowerment? The KRAS Kickers Trial Finder provides a practical example of that work.
Business, Technology, Advocacy and the Human Experience
Chris joined the WCLC educational session AI in Lung Cancer Care: Implementation, Equity, and Global Perspectives with more than three decades of experience building information technology and data systems across business, government, health care, insurance, and banking. His experience brings an understanding of how systems scale, how information moves, what they are designed to accomplish, and where risk can enter.
As husband and partner in care to the KRAS Kickers founder Terri Conneran, Chris also brings lived experience navigating cancer care and seeing firsthand the information gaps, barriers, and decisions people face.
His advocacy work connects those perspectives by asking who is being served, what people need to make informed decisions, and how technology can support trust, transparency, privacy, and patient empowerment.
That intersection shaped his WCLC presentation and the work behind the KRAS Kickers Trial Finder and patient empowerment as artificial intelligence becomes part of cancer care.
The KRAS Kickers Trial Finder as a Real World Example
KRAS Kickers identified a gap in how people with KRAS altered cancers find, understand, and explore relevant clinical trial opportunities across regions and health care systems. Chris led the technical development of the KRAS Kickers Trial Finder to help address that gap.
The Trial Finder helps people explore interventional treatment trials based on their clinical context and selected geographic area. The search includes approaches across the treatment landscape, including options beyond therapies that directly target KRAS. The purpose is to help people understand potential opportunities, ask stronger questions, and have more informed conversations with their health care team.
Good Intentions Create Unintended Results
In his WCLC presentation, Patient Perspective: Trust, Transparency, Expectations, and Communication, Chris framed the conversation around a simple message: Before You Click. As Chris shared during the WCLC discussion,
"Before you click, know what the technology is designed to do and whose objective it is built to serve."
Chris used the Cobra Effect to show why that question matters. A well intended solution can create incentives that produce unintended results when the system begins optimizing for a measure of success that may differ from what the person using it needs.
A clinical trial search tool may genuinely aim to help people while also operating within a business model that rewards referrals, enrollment, or directing people toward particular sites or services. Understanding those incentives is part of understanding the technology.
The KRAS Kickers Trial Finder puts that principle into practice through independent trial exploration, defined search rules, limited data collection, and a design centered on understanding, better questions, shared decision making, and patient empowerment.
Built With Patients: Trust, Transparency and Empowerment From the Start
International Lung Cancer News, ILCN, highlighted Chris and the KRAS Kickers Trial Finder in its WCLC coverage, describing the clinical trial search gap KRAS Kickers identified and the importance of privacy, transparency, clinical context, and shared decision making.
For KRAS Kickers, this work reflects our mission. Knowledge gives people information to ask stronger questions. Research creates new possibilities. Advocacy helps keep people part of the decisions, systems, and technologies that affect their care. Survivorship is the purpose behind the work. Technology can connect all four when it is built with purpose, transparency, and respect for the people using it. To kick cancer's KRAS!
Patients and care partners helped define the needs and the problem from the beginning. Trust, transparency and empowerment were built into the work from the start rather than added later.
Bottom line, Conneran concluded;
"Technology should work for the patient, not the patient for the technology."
Explore the KRAS Kickers Trial Finder and read the ILCN coverage of AI in Lung Cancer Care at IASLC WCLC 2026.
