While volunteering in the infusion rooms at the Breast Cancer Research Center during her freshman year, computational biology junior Nicole Wu realized many cancer patients faced the same problem: a lack of support upon returning home. Shortly after, she began working on her start-up app, Panacea, to make life and responsibilities easier for cancer patients at home.
Hospitals typically give cancer patients a binder with many resources inside when they leave; however, cancer survivor Leslie Foxworth said finding and applying these resources can be tedious and frustrating. Wu said Panacea personalizes fitness classes, financial resources and cancer-related communities to the patient depending on their condition and location, and uses conversational AI to help patients easily find the resources they need.
“(The app) provides you resources that can help you through those really dark times without you having to look at your doctor or be in a scary office,” Foxworth said. “It’s care outside the clinic walls in the middle of the night when we need it. I wish I had something like this at the newly diagnosed phase.”
Wu began thinking about Panacea when she joined the Social Entrepreneurship Learning Lab in her freshman year, where she refined her business idea. Since then, she participated in the Sustainability Education Enterprise Development Program and the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute as a 2025 founder, and enrolled in Capital Factory, a class where she better understood the pitching process. Through these UT-affiliated organizations, Wu participated in four pitch competitions and raised over $16,000 to fund her company.
“Students will take a year or two to get a venture off the ground, but she did this pretty quickly, and it was because she is very dedicated and organized in her time,” said Madison Khamooshi, the Global Sustainability Leadership Institute senior program manager.
With her team, Wu works closely with 30 breast cancer patients at the Breast Cancer Research Center. They are working to improve the app’s conversational AI and create a resource hub so all resources remain centralized, ensuring the app recommends the right materials and strengthens the communication between the patient and doctor.
“I’ve seen (Wu) learn a lot more about the cancer community and get excited about what she can do to be a solution specialist for cancer survivors, instead of just feeling like, ‘Man, that’s really sad. I wish I could do something about it,’” Foxworth said. “Now it’s ‘Man that’s really sad, I know I can do something about this. Let’s go.’”
This summer, Wu and her team sent a research proposal to the UT Institutional Review Board, and Wu said that by the end of the summer, she and her research team hope to propose their second study and publish it at the end of the year. Next year, she said she hopes to partner with healthcare professionals to begin customizing the app for their needs.
