Speaker Profile
M. Eng., Director of Product Management, Johns Hopkins Technology Innovation Center
Biography
Aalok Shah is the Director of Product Management for the Johns Hopkins inHealth Precision Medicine Initiative, where he helps translate scientific advances into the clinical setting. Aalok has 15 years of experience in product management, with a focus on gaining insights from large quantities of data and simplifying complex processes. Most recently, he led the Immigration Transformation team at the US Digital Service, which worked to digitize the US immigration system. He earned his BS and MEng degrees from MIT.
Talk
Clinical Dx Showcase: Individualized Health and Innovation in Prostate Cancer
In the mid 1990s, not treating prostate cancer was considered heresy. At that time, the urology and pathology teams at Johns Hopkins observed that a substantial proportion of radical prostatectomy specimens harbored indolent appearing tumors, similar to what was commonly found at autopsy in men not diagnosed with prostate cancer. This observation prompted the creation of an active surveillance program to monitor men with indolent appearing prostate cancers. Our team has systematically collected and integrated diverse measurements of patients’ trajectories including biomarkers, tissue sampling, and imaging. These longitudinal data have been analyzed to address the patient’s health state and inform decision making during surveillance. In 2018, Johns Hopkins Urology will launch the Prostate Active Surveillance Tool for internal use. This tool will help prostate cancer patients and their providers understand the possible paths their disease could take, and will provide context that informs their individual treatment decisions. The Prostate Active Surveillance Tool is one example of how we are creating a learning health system. We are looking to improve the patient experience, so we can continue making patients into partners that will help accelerate science, at Johns Hopkins and beyond.
