Utah Mom Beats Cancer, Builds AI Platform Helping Thousands

When Jenny Ahlstrom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at 43, doctors gave her about two years to live. Today, she's cancer-free and running a platform that's helping thousands of patients find the treatments that could save their lives.

Ahlstrom, a mother of six from Salt Lake City, faced an aggressive form of blood cancer with a grim prognosis. The five-year survival rate was about 50%, but her high-risk genetics made her outlook even worse.

She endured years of grueling treatment, including two back-to-back stem cell transplants that kept her away from her family for months. Then came a breakthrough: CAR-T cell therapy, an innovative treatment that reprograms a patient's own immune cells to attack cancer.

"We infuse this drug and these cells go in and they just create havoc and they kill all the cancer," said Dr. Douglas Sborov, who treated Ahlstrom at the University of Utah's Huntsman Cancer Institute. The treatment worked, and Ahlstrom has been in remission for four and a half years.

But she didn't stop there. Two years into her cancer journey, Ahlstrom founded the HealthTree Foundation, a nonprofit that uses artificial intelligence to revolutionize how patients access treatment information.

The platform solves a critical problem: medical data is scattered across different hospitals and systems. HealthTree pulls it together into a single patient record, helping both patients and researchers understand which treatments work best.

Tasks that once took doctors hours now take minutes thanks to AI. Patients can discover advanced treatments like CAR-T therapy they might never have learned about otherwise.

The Ripple Effect

Since 2012, HealthTree has grown to serve tens of thousands of patients and integrates data from more than 4,000 hospitals. The platform now reaches millions worldwide and is expanding beyond blood cancers to include solid tumors.

The impact goes beyond individual patients. By making data accessible to researchers, HealthTree is accelerating the search for cures and helping doctors identify which treatments work for specific patient types.

"They've been able to do some things that many academic centers only dream of," Sborov said. The data is helping shift the conversation from managing cancer to curing it.

"We never used to use the word 'cure,'" Sborov explained. "That was something that was taboo in our field because it was so far away. But now what we're able to do is we're able to start using that word cure."

For Ahlstrom, the transformation is profound. "Having cancer is like playing chess with your life, and you just don't want to make a wrong move," she said.

What began as a devastating diagnosis has become something entirely different: a mission that's giving hope to patients around the world and bringing the medical community closer to cures that once seemed impossible.