How Andrew Pecora, MD, Is Using AI to Help Physicians Fix the Cost Crisis in Cancer Care

Andrew Pecora, MD, has never been the kind of physician who chooses a lane and stays in it. The hematologist-oncologist, stem cell transplant pioneer, and CEO of OMI Management sat down with Gina Mauro on The Moonlight Shift to talk about a career defined not by one institution or one idea, but by a relentless instinct to identify a problem and build something to solve it.

It started in New Jersey. After training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medicine, Pecora turned down offers to stay in New York and returned to his home state to do something it didn’t have: bone marrow transplantation. “New Jersey didn’t have bone marrow transplant,” he said. “So even though I was kind of young, I said I’m going to go back to my home state and create it.” He and colleague Joel Brockstein, MD, stood up the first bone marrow transplant program in the state — a program that would eventually become John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack Meridian Health, now ranked 38th in the country by U.S. News & World Report and home to one of the largest blood and marrow stem cell programs in the world.

The journey from a single adult infusion chair to a nationally recognized NCI-designated cancer center required more than clinical expertise. Pecora credited the patient experience philosophy he developed by partnering with an unlikely pair of consultants. “I hired the Ritz Carlton and Walt Disney to come and guide me about the patient experience,” he said. “People have their lives taken from them by this disease we call cancer — could you give them something back?” The result was a facility with a cooking studio and yoga spa built into its design — features that were groundbreaking at the time and widely replicated since.

But it was a different kind of pioneering that may define his legacy in the science. Pecora led the first human trial of an intravenous oncolytic virus in patients with advanced solid tumors — the first time such a therapy had ever been administered to a human being. The rationale was elegant: tumors often fail to trigger an immune response, but viruses always do. “The simple idea was, if you could get a virus to insert itself in the cancer and not the normal tissue, maybe you can elicit an immune response and potentially cure the cancer,” he explained. The trial worked. Over 18 months, it laid the groundwork for oncolytic virus therapies now used globally.

That same problem-solving instinct drove Pecora to build Regional Cancer Care Associates, one of the largest oncology physician networks in the country, on the premise that community oncologists — despite world-class training — had no market clout as isolated small practices. By organizing the largest groups into a unified network, RCCA grew to nearly 200 physicians across four states before joining U.S. Oncology.

The thread connecting all of it, Pecora argues, is the fundamental misalignment at the center of American healthcare: the system is not designed for the people who use it. Today, through OMI Management, he is working to change that — using AI trained on real-world clinical data to surface cost-equivalent treatment options at the point of care, removing administrative friction, and building a reimbursement model that rewards physicians for making care more affordable without sacrificing outcomes.

“The best people in the country to control the cost of care are the physicians delivering it,” he said. “Only a doctor can decide where to cut costs without sacrificing quality — at the point of care, in real time, with their patient.”

The Moonlight Shift is available on YouTube and across MJH Life Sciences' oncology platforms. New episodes, released bi-weekly, feature leading and early-career oncologists from the Tri-State corridor in peer-level conversations about where the field is going — and what it still has to work out.