Digital health · Oncology patient engagement
Liyfe
An AI chatbot built to triage cancer patients' symptoms between office visits, grown out of a medical physicist's telemedicine clinic for breast cancer care. Y Combinator backed it in 2020. By 2023, PitchBook had marked it out of business.
Seventeen minutes
That is the number Dr. Lily Tang kept coming back to when she talked about why she built Liyfe. As a medical physicist in radiation oncology, she had spent thirteen years watching patients leave appointments more confused than when they arrived. "In fact, the average time a cancer patient gets to talk to a doctor is only 17 minutes," she wrote in a 2020 Hacker News launch post. Without enough time to explain a treatment plan, she said, patients could not follow their home instructions, and their compliance suffered.
Her answer started as a telemedicine clinic, Liyfe Clinic, offering breast cancer patients video consultations with oncologists, nutritionists and therapists, plus a chat line staffed by nurse practitioners. It later became something narrower and more technical: an AI chatbot meant to do a version of that triage automatically, at scale, for oncology drug trials and NASH patients as well as cancer patients broadly.
The gap it aimed at
"Over the last several years, healthcare has shifted from quality to quantity of care," Tang told Forbes when Liyfe Clinic launched in August 2020. "On average, breast cancer patients spend 17 minutes with oncologists, and only 5% of them understand their treatment." Her diagnosis of the problem was consistent across venues: patients turn to the internet for answers because no one has enough time to give them, and by the time they see a clinician again, misunderstandings have compounded.
"Patients usually go to Google or social media to get information about their cancer treatment, which makes it hard for us to re-educate them," she told Forbes. The stated fix was to put an oncology-trained professional, human or eventually automated, on the other end of a text message instead.
Two co-founders, one reunion
Tang and Sherry Chen met at a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni reunion in the summer of 2018, according to Forbes. Tang brought the clinical background: faculty positions at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Yale's Smilow Cancer Center, per Forbes and her Y Combinator bio, plus training at Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital and UC San Diego and a faculty stint at UNC-Chapel Hill, per the Y Combinator company page. Chen brought the engineering. "I wrote the first line of code exactly 2 years ago, at that time, we couldn't even find the infrastructure that is hipaa compliant (like messaging api etc), and we have to build everything on our own," she wrote on Hacker News in 2020, describing how the two of them built a HIPAA-compliant messaging, video and records platform from scratch before commercial tools caught up.
The company's name has a family story attached. Per Forbes, Tang's fourteen-year-old son, Sheng, suggested it: "Mom, you are saving lives so let's call it Life. And let's add a 'y' in the middle, Liyfe, so that it sounds more tech-y."
From clinic to chatbot
Liyfe Clinic graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch, the accelerator's first fully remote cohort, with a reported $150,000 in YC funding, according to Forbes and PitchBook. At launch, the company told Forbes it planned to partner with two other YC-backed breast cancer companies: Eva, a Mexico-based breast imaging startup, would refer US patients to Liyfe for second opinions, and iSono Health, maker of a wearable breast ultrasound device, would have its product offered to Liyfe's patients.
By January 2021, the company had filed a patent application, "Digital Nurse for Symptom and Risk Assessment," assigned to Liyfe, Inc. of Connecticut and naming Xueyan Chen and Xiaoli Tang as inventors, per Google Patents' record of the filing. That same year Liyfe joined the first cohort of PharmStars, a pharma-focused digital health accelerator founded by former pharma executive Naomi Fried, whose members include Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca's Alexion, Boehringer Ingelheim, Takeda, Novo Nordisk and Sumitovant. MedCity News, covering the December 2021 graduation, described Liyfe as "A New York company with an AI-based digital nurse chatbot for patient engagement and capture of RWE in oncology and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis." PharmStars' own program page describes the same pivot in the company's words: "We offer the first AI-based digital nurse chatbot designed to reduce trial dropout and medication non-compliance in oncology and NASH patients."
No public announcement marks what happened after that. PitchBook's record shows no funding events between the January 2021 accelerator listing and an "Out of Business" status dated August 24, 2023, with four employees on record at that point. The patent application was abandoned for failure to respond to an office action, per its USPTO status as shown on Google Patents, and the companion international application lapsed as well.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Y Combinator, Summer 2020 | Liyfe Clinic graduated from YC's first fully remote batch with a reported $150,000 investment. | Public record |
| PharmStars accelerator | Named in MedCity News among 12 graduates of PharmStars' first cohort, themed on clinical trial innovation, December 2021. | Independent |
| Patent application | US20220215957A1 and WO2022150324A1, "Digital Nurse for Symptom and Risk Assessment," priority date Jan 5, 2021, assigned to Liyfe, Inc., inventors Xueyan Chen and Xiaoli Tang. Status: abandoned for failure to respond to an office action; the PCT filing is listed as ceased. | Public record |
| SEC Form D filings | None found for Liyfe in SEC EDGAR's full text search, checked September 25, 2026. | Not found |
| FDA clearance | No 510(k) or PMA record found for the company. | Not found |
| Registered clinical trials | No trial listing found tied to Liyfe or Liyfe Clinic. | Not found |
| Federal grants and peer-reviewed papers | No NIH or NSF award and no PubMed publication tied to the company or its founders were found. | Not found |
| Partnerships with Eva and iSono Health | Announced by the company to Forbes in August 2020 as referral and product arrangements. No later confirmation of either partnership was found. | Company-stated |
| Company status | PitchBook lists Liyfe as "Out of Business" with a status date of August 24, 2023 and four employees at last count. | Independent |
Read plainly: Liyfe's story is well documented at the front end, a Y Combinator batch, an accelerator cohort, a patent filing, and thin at the back end. There is no SEC filing to confirm how much money the company actually raised beyond the reported YC check, no FDA or trial record to test its clinical claims, and no announcement of what happened to the company after 2021. The abandoned patent and the PitchBook status entry are the closest things to a documented ending.
What to watch
- Whether Dr. Tang or Sherry Chen resurface with a successor venture in oncology digital health.
- Any SEC filing that would confirm the reported $150,000 Y Combinator investment or any later capital.
- Whether the abandoned patent application is ever revived or reassigned.
In their words
“Over the last several years, healthcare has shifted from quality to quantity of care.”
Dr. Lily Tang, co-founder and CEO, Forbes, August 2020 · Independent
“On average, breast cancer patients spend 17 minutes with oncologists, and only 5% of them understand their treatment.”
Dr. Lily Tang, Forbes, August 2020 · Independent
“Patients usually go to Google or social media to get information about their cancer treatment, which makes it hard for us to re-educate them.”
Dr. Lily Tang, Forbes, August 2020 · Independent
“In fact, the average time a cancer patient gets to talk to a doctor is only 17 minutes.”
Dr. Lily Tang, Hacker News launch post, August 2020 · Company
“I wrote the first line of code exactly 2 years ago, at that time, we couldn't even find the infrastructure that is hipaa compliant (like messaging api etc), and we have to build everything on our own.”
Sherry Chen, co-founder, Hacker News, August 2020 · Company
“Mom, you are saving lives so let's call it Life. And let's add a 'y' in the middle, Liyfe, so that it sounds more tech-y.”
Sheng, Dr. Tang's son, quoted by Forbes, August 2020 · Independent
“We offer the first AI-based digital nurse chatbot designed to reduce trial dropout and medication non-compliance in oncology and NASH patients.”
Liyfe, PharmStars startup profile · Company
“A New York company with an AI-based digital nurse chatbot for patient engagement and capture of RWE in oncology and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.”
Frank Vinluan, MedCity News, December 8, 2021 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- CompanyLiyfe company page
- IndependentFemBeat: YC-Backed Liyfe Clinic Launches An Online Service To Provide Breast Cancer Patients With The Knowledge And Resources They Need
- CompanyLaunch HN: Liyfe Clinic (YC S20), Telemedicine for breast cancer
- CompanyLiyfe startup profile
- IndependentFirst cohort of digital health startups graduates from PharmStars accelerator
- IndependentLiyfe company profile: valuation, funding and investors
- Public recordUS20220215957A1 and WO2022150324A1, Digital Nurse for Symptom and Risk Assessment
- Public recordFull text search for "Liyfe," no Form D results
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
