Limits & responsibility
HackCancer is an education and engineering initiative. It gathers learning material, reproducible snippets, and critical context for computational cancer work among technologists — not patient care advice.
Not medical care
HackCancer does not:
- diagnose, treat, prescribe, or triage suspected cancer;
- recommend trials, diets, supplements, off-label therapies, “AI cures,” or heroic self-experimentation;
- substitute for oncologists, pathologists, genetic counsellors, or regulators;
- ingest or solicit protected health information without an explicit lawful basis and governance.
Individuals seeking care should rely on licensed clinicians within their jurisdictions.
Data, licences, privacy
Materials here lean on public datasets and responsibly published evidence. Practical rules:
| Expectation | What it protects |
|---|---|
| Respect licences & access policies | Data stewards plus downstream patients |
| No scraping or re-identifying protected cohorts without authority | Legal safeguards and dignity of data subjects |
| Store credentials & tokens outside public repos | Your organisation’s compliance posture |
When in doubt about whether a corpus is permissible for reuse, pause and escalate to whoever owns your compliance review.
Research integrity
Responsible technical practice means questioning:
- flashy accuracy claims without leakage-safe validation;
- “significant” p-hacking dashboards;
- model outputs presented as deterministic biological truth;
- missing provenance — where did specimens, pipelines, thresholds come from?;
- correlations masquerading as bedside decisions.
Treat every notebook as provisional until audited by peers with domain competence.
What we expect from builders
HackCancer targets builders who crave rigor. If anything on this site is unclear, contradictory, outdated, or overconfident, open an issue (or propose a corrective pull request) documenting observed harm risk versus simply aesthetic preference.
Where to escalate human risk
Anything hinting at self-directed clinical experimentation belongs outside this project. Stop, document, escalate to supervisors, ethicists, and IRBs before touching patients' lives.
See also
- Mission — the why
- Project status — what's done, what's not, and how to help today
- Roadmap — direction without dates
- Regulatory & ethics — the formal framework
- Data governance & LGPD — privacy law specifics
- Contact