Hi, I'm Michele Ronco. I'm thirty-five, and in July 2026 I was diagnosed with metastatic stage IV ALK-positive lung cancer. It is a rare disease, kept under control today by targeted therapies. ALK+ is only three to five percent of lung cancers, and it mostly hits young people who have never smoked. There are not many of us.

I am also an AI researcher, PhD in Theoretical Physics, with ten years across universities in the USA, France, Spain and Italy, on problems ranging from black holes to climate risk. Everywhere I went, I learned the same thing: everything starts with data.

In the weeks after the diagnosis I started reaching out to oncologists, biologists and researchers who have been working on ALK for years. I wanted to understand where the frontier is, and where the holes are. The holes are large. Data on ALK+ patients is scarce, fragmented, and most of the time not public. The clinical trials we base our decisions on rest on small numbers, and once the first drug stops working — second line, third line — there are no clear guidelines on what to try next. In most cancers we are still stuck with "one drug fits all, forever". I believe that to move toward truly personalised therapy we need more data on more patients, continuously, and we need to combine disciplines that normally do not talk to each other, patients included.

In three months, with the help of volunteers, friends and family, we started building Allkure as an open, non-profit project. The first concrete step is already live: a global, anonymous patient registry in five languages (IT, EN, ES, FR, DE), together with open datasets — something that does not exist elsewhere, and is essential to understand resistance patterns and guide second and third line therapy with real-world evidence.

If you are an ALK+ patient, this is the single most powerful thing you can do today: join the registry. It takes about 15 minutes, your data stays pseudonymised, and every patient added makes the research built on it stronger.

Join the registry (EN): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdEFRSeE4Q0v-CB8Q80WL4wmacTsYEQ6N50en-LPJ3ys27jYg/viewform

Visit the project: https://allkure.org

First open scientific tool: https://allkure.org/alkscape

Why I am asking for your help now.

This is not a job for one person. The knowledge, the skills, the data are all out there; what is missing is someone to put them together on this specific problem, using the tools we actually have today.

If you also believe, as I do, that in a world made of data, shared knowledge and artificial intelligence cancer research can move faster — and in ways less conventional than those we have used so far — then this is a project you can help bring to life. If you also believe, half as a challenge and half as a matter of spirit, in the slightly mad idea of a physicist with cancer trying to change the rules of the game, this is the moment to be here.

Target of this campaign: €100,000, to co-fund two PhD positions on ALK and off-target resistance mechanisms, in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, and to keep the registry and open scientific tools running through their first year.

Every euro will be used exclusively for Allkure, with full traceability. Anything raised above the target accelerates the next hires and the development of the project directly.

A one-centimetre tumour contains about one billion cells. It is strong because there are so many of them, together. I started alone. Now I need you.

If you can give, thank you. If you can share, that is just as powerful. If you want to contribute actively — as a scientist, clinician, volunteer, advisor, or patient — write to us at info [at] allkure [dot] org

Michele Ronco · patient and founder, Allkure

allkure.org