MEHTATRON
What is this?
Mehtatron visualizes the history of cancer drug approvals, from the earliest nitrogen mustard trials of the 1940s to the latest targeted therapies and immunotherapies. Every card represents a drug and its earliest indication date for the selected cancer type.
It started off as an Easter egg in this project, but I'm enjoying it so much myself that it might get promoted to a main section. Making it as an Easter egg let me get way more wild and funky with the colors and animations, and I'm kind of into it. Lmk what you think.
Why "Mehtatron?"
Neil Mehta is one of the greatest educators and nicest people I've ever met. His teaching is marked by compassion - case in point, he empathizes deeply with medical students in the modern era, who have an absolutely insane number of drugs to memorize.
Occasionally, in clinic, he would do an exercise going something like this (heavily paraphrased):
"That's a chonky textbook you have there. Oh, it's just the cliffnotes? It's still 600 pages! My oh my. Tell you what. Let's try something.
I've been seeing patients for a while now. When I came out of medical school, we had a comparatively small number of tools to work with to help our patients. I learned about each new treatment as it came to market.
Each new treatment allowed me to help someone who was previously underserved by what I had on formulary. Over time, I've built up knowledge one drug at a time, one story at a time - this was so much easier than being handed a thick textbook with a million drugs and being told to memorize them! Us old guys and gals forget that's the way we learned all the things, and expect you to just pick it up by brute force.
Humans learn best through stories, not huge tables of facts and figures.
So, here's what we're going to do:"
He would then give a patient narrative, relevant lab results, etc., and instruct the student to lock their treatment armamentarium to what was available at a given point in history. Then, fast forward to some year - same patient, same presentation - but now what can we do?
By researching the development of some aspect of medicine over time, they could, vicariously, build up their own stories, and a daunting list of apparent trivia would be, at least in one way, transformed into a narrative of triumph.
Each point in history represents, yes, another fact to memorize - but also more options, more people who can be helped, often with less adverse effects (penicillin is a much better antisyphilitic than arsphenamine!).
This project is inspired by that type of learning and thinking, dedicated to the Mehtatron himself.
It also owes a debt of gratitude to Jeremy Warner, Peter Yang, and the rest of the hemonc.org team, who do an incredible job collecting and maintaining a truly staggering amount of data in our field.
How to use it
The interface is a progressive drill-down. Start by selecting a condition type (e.g. Thoracic, Lymphoid, Breast). Then narrow to a specific condition (e.g. NSCLC, CLL). For many conditions, you can drill further into biomarker buckets (e.g. HER2+, EGFR, BRCA).
Hover over any pill to see which drug cards match. Click pills to filter. Use the date slider to scrub through time.
Data sources
Drug approval data is curated from HemOnc.org, a freely available wiki of oncology regimens licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Additional context and biomarker mappings are hand-curated from FDA labels and landmark publications.
Scope & filtering
HemOnc tracks ~875 drugs. Not all of them show up here. Mehtatron filters to FDA-approved oncology drugs with cancer indications: