Afshine Emrani MD FACC on X: "I'm a cardiologist. Let me tell you about the most extraordinary act of patient agency I've ever encountered.<br>In 2024, a tech founder named Sid Sijbrandij was told by his oncologists that they had nothing left. His osteosarcoma — an aggressive bone cancer in his spine — had" / X<br>Post

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Afshine Emrani MD FACC

@afshineemrani

I'm a cardiologist. Let me tell you about the most extraordinary act of patient agency I've ever encountered.<br>In 2024, a tech founder named Sid Sijbrandij was told by his oncologists that they had nothing left. His osteosarcoma — an aggressive bone cancer in his spine — had returned after surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy so brutal he needed four blood transfusions to survive it. He'd exhausted every standard treatment. He wouldn't qualify for clinical trials. The implicit message: good luck.<br>Most people accept that verdict. Sijbrandij — co-founder of GitLab, a company worth $6.4 billion built on the principle that information should be open and transparent — decided to treat his cancer the way he'd built his company.<br>He went founder mode.<br>He quit his day job. Assembled a dream team. Hired a geneticist named Jacob Stern, formerly of 10x Genomics. And then he did something no cancer patient has ever done at this scale.<br>He generated 25 terabytes of his own medical data.<br>Whole genome sequencing. Whole exome sequencing. Bulk RNA-seq. Single-cell RNA-seq across multiple timepoints. Full-body PET/CT scans. Organoid models grown from his own tumor tissue. Immunohistochemistry. Spatial transcriptomics. Every diagnostic modality that exists — run on his specific cancer, at his specific stage, from his specific body.<br>Then Jacob Stern fed it all to ChatGPT<br>span:not(:empty)~span:not(:empty)]:before:content-['·'] [&>span:not(:empty)~span:not(:empty)]:before:px-1 [&>span:not(:empty)~span:not(:empty)]:before:shrink-0">4:54 PM · Jul 1, 2026145.4KViews

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