Manta Cares Advances AI Chatbot Tool to Guide Patients Along Cancer Precision Medicine Pathway

New York - Apr 09, 2026 | Alison Kanski

Cancer survivors and oncologists have built an artificial intelligence-enabled platform and chatbot to help patients learn about genetic testing and biomarkers and ensure they are prepared for appointments where their oncologist may discuss precision medicine approaches.

When the San Francisco-based company Manta Cares was initially founded back in 2022, it provided cancer patients supportive information via paper brochures. Now, amid rapidly changing guidelines and newly emerging biomarkers important for personalizing treatment, the firm has built an AI-enabled chatbot to answer patients' questions about the increasingly complicated process of diagnosing and treating cancer. The large language model-based chatbot, called Hope, runs on top of Manta Cares' cancer maps, a navigation tool patients can use to chart their treatment path. Patients can also query the chatbot about where they are in their treatment process and how to prepare for the next steps.

Samira Daswani, Manta Cares founder and CEO, said the digital tools have been used so far by about 3,000 patients and caregivers. In 2025, the combined paper and digital tools were used by 10,000 patients, she added.

The company has advanced these tools in partnership with more than 40 nonprofits, six health systems, and three pharma companies, Daswani said. The platform currently allows patients to track the progress of their cancer treatments and tests with cancer maps for early-stage breast cancer, metastatic breast cancer, and non-small cell lung cancer, indications in which germline risk assessment and molecular tumor profiling is typically part of the standard work-up to decide personalized treatment options.

"About 30 percent of our conversations with Hope [the AI chatbot] today are directly relevant to biomarkers," Daswani said. "If you think about it from a patient perspective, understanding individual biomarkers is a secondary piece. The first step is addressing that most patients don't understand the word biomarker."

The information patients receive via cancer maps and the chatbot are patient-friendly, with medical jargon explained in plain language, and break down the process of genetic testing for cancer into individual steps that resemble a public transit map with different lines and stations. For example, Manta Cares' early-stage breast cancer map includes a step after cancer is diagnosed and a biopsy is collected that dives into the details of germline genetic testing.

On this map, patients can track their progress. In the genetic testing step, for example, patients can follow along the map's predefined steps, pinning themselves on the map upon meeting with a genetic counselor, identifying which tests to do, determining if insurance covers testing, providing a sample for testing, and receiving results.

This is how the platform introduces the idea of cancer genetics and biomarkers as a typical step in the treatment process.

"The first thing is making sure the patient is trying to think about biomarkers in the context of their disease," Daswani said. "The second piece is understanding it in terms of what having a certain biomarker, such as hormone-positive breast cancer, means for them."

Once doctors and patients received biomarker test results, the map then breaks out information about each of the potential findings. For example, the map provides information, videos, and AI support for what happens next in the treatment process when patients have cancer risk mutations in known hereditary cancer genes, such as BRCA1, BRCA2, ATM, and others; when there are variants of uncertain significance; or even when no mutations are detected.

Manta Cares also suggests questions patients can ask the genetic counselor or other healthcare providers at each step. If a patient with early-stage breast cancer is recommended for germline genetic testing, the platform suggests asking whether that testing will be covered by insurance, if the test panel covers all the genes relevant to breast cancer risk, or if family members also need testing. Patients can also ask the Hope chatbot any questions that they think of, and it will provide a conversational response based on the information in the cancer map.

The chatbot is also programmed to answer detailed questions for patients who want more information. For patients wanting to know about variants of uncertain significance, for example, the platform suggests questions like, "What are the chances my VUS will be reclassified as harmful in the future?" or" How often do doctors learn more about what these gene changes mean?" The chatbot then relays information to patients about ongoing VUS research and the need for regular check-ins with a patient's genetics team to see if there are updated variant classifications. It suggests patients ask their genetic counselors about how to stay updated on detected variants as more evidence emerges over time.

"Our platform gets the patient to actionability," Daswani said. "I would say [the] understanding [stage] is where most other tools stop. Making it actionable can move the patient from, 'I'm a metastatic breast cancer patient at progression' to 'I need to ask my doctor about ESR1 testing.' It's helping them prepare for that upcoming visit in the context of where they are [on the map] and helping them take action around their biomarkers."

The team designed Hope to help patients identify their main goals during an appointment and provide targeted information or suggest questions for achieving those goals. Daswani said oncology appointments are often short, between eight and 15 minutes, so Hope is designed to help patients identify the top three things they want to achieve in that time.

Daswani said patients are most commonly using Manta Cares to prepare for appointments, manage side effects, and understand their treatment options.

Typically, patients tend to hunt for answers to questions about treatment processes via Google searches, and they end up with general information that may not be relevant or wrong. With Hope, the goal was to provide a more focused alternative to Dr. Google, Daswani noted. "The behavior of information seeking is just part and parcel of the experience in oncology today," she said. "The question becomes how do we build a tool that makes the experience better than randomly searching for information?"

In order to keep up with the rapidly changing research and guidelines in oncology, Manta Cares employs a dedicated medical team and clinical advisory board members who monitor guidelines and update information in the cancer maps as new drugs are approved or new biomarker tests are recommended.

"The cancer map is what we ground and guardrail the conversation [with Hope] on," Daswani said."Because the map is what is getting curated and reviewed by our physician teams, they're making sure it reflects the standard of care, the best that medicine has to offer."

Because the platform is used only by patients and does not access medical records, it does not fall under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which only applies to healthcare providers, insurance plans, and vendors that contract with these groups. The company does, however, have a consumer health data privacy policy, in which they disclose what data is collected and how it is used to comply with US state laws that offer protections beyond HIPAA, like Washington's My HealthMy Data Act or California's Consumer Privacy Act.

Going forward, Manta Cares is continuing to expand its offerings and hopes to offer cancer maps for other cancer types. The company is also partnering with researchers to explore how patients useManta Cares in the real-world setting, Daswani said. This research is looking at sub-populations with specific needs such as metastatic triple-negative breast cancer and the geriatric breast cancer population, she added, to better understand how the platform supports these groups.

"Our goal is not to displace the doctors," Daswani said. "In oncology, you need to talk to a specialist and that need is not going away. Our job is to enable that patient to show up to that 8-to-15-minute appointment in a way that the patient can leverage to get the best of medicine."