Q&A: After finding few answers about her own rare cancer, Corrie Painter is crowdsourcing to fill cancer ‘data vacuum’
In May 2010, Corrie Painter received shocking news: She had angiosarcoma, an extremely rare cancer that forms in blood vessels and lymph vessels. Painter, who by that point had a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, searched the scientific literature for answers. What she found was a vacuum — very little data and research into her aggressive and often-fatal cancer, primary angiosarcoma of the breast.
In the decade since, Painter underwent surgery to remove her diseased cells and has remained clear of cancer. And she has made it her mission to expedite the pace of discovery for angiosarcoma and other rare cancers. She is associate director of operations and scientific outreach for the Cancer Program of MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute. Through that role, she is in charge of the Angiosarcoma Project and is deputy director of Count Me In, both of which aim to make patient data (tumor samples, medical records, and more) readily available for researchers interested in decoding rare cancers.
