AOI’s Inaugural AISCO Cancer Drug Shortage Hackathon concluded on December 8th with nine teams presenting solutions to the cancer drug shortage in the US. The White House has created a task force to tackle the issue, focusing on the supply chain for cancer drugs, as well as established a new Council on Supply Chain Resilience.

Teams’ proposed solutions focused on a wide variety of issues within the problem space including international coordination between health systems and drug manufacturers, supplier contract structuring, local surpluses of cancer drugs, siloed communication systems, and multi-tier supply chain visibility. Numerous teams leveraged Large Language Models and novel generative AI methodologies to enhance supply resiliency for cancer drugs, as well as identifying governance approaches that leverage existing international cooperation frameworks such as the G7. The judges included leading experts and practitioners from the fields of supply chain management, artificial intelligence and AI ethics.

Taking first prize in the event was the Spot Health team who proposed a live person-to-person marketplace for matching local surpluses in the supply of cancer drugs with cancer patients impacted by the shortage. Spot Health’s technical approach was compared with a “down detector” map view showing surpluses and shortages and noted that the overall description of the "shortage" often masked the existence of local surpluses that could provide patients in need with the remedy of an urgent supply.

Second prize was awarded to the Procuro AI team who demonstrated an innovative Large Language Model to address the issue of exclusivity clauses in contract structuring between group purchasing organizations and healthcare providers. Procuro AI's bespoke LLM demonstrated the capability to review large sets of purchasing contracts to help identify clauses that could lead to drug supply shortages and single points of failure.

The Hackathon’s Audience Winner went to the Scan.ly team who demonstrated an AI solution to configure a live event stream for cancer drugs traveling through the pharmaceutical supply chain, enabling supply chain and procurement teams to rapidly identify bottlenecks, delays or quality issues and pinpointing them to specific points of failure with rapidity and precision.

In addition to the excellent submissions that earned the top prizes, the panel was pleased to hear excellent submissions addressing other components of the larger supply chain problem. Taken together, these submissions provided a broad variety of innovative solutions. 

The AISCO team, with the support of Ethical Resolve, will be adapting the results of the Hackathon, and associated surveys, to better define the problem space of AI governance in the supply chain. Next, AISCO will explore possibilities for developing and deploying some subset of these solutions in order to address the risks and opportunities associated with the emergent introduction of AI decision systems across modern supply chains and procurement operations.