SAN DIEGO — Dr. Raphael Cuomo does not look for the easiest questions in medicine. He looks for the ones that no one else is asking.
A professor at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, Dr. Cuomo is at the vanguard of a new kind of cancer research—one that fuses epidemiology, behavioral science, and clinical informatics to ask not just why disease occurs, but how society quietly allows it to grow.
His data sets are sprawling, his code fastidious. But his mission is disarmingly simple: to understand how addiction, mental illness, and systemic gaps in care are shaping who gets cancer, who survives, and who is forgotten.
“It’s not enough to know that a treatment works in a vacuum,” Dr. Cuomo said. “You have to understand who’s excluded from that success.”
That conviction led to one of his most widely discussed studies, which showed that cancer patients with cannabis use disorder had drastically higher mortality, even after adjusting for a range of factors, including patient demographics and severity of the underlying cancer. The work drew immediate headlines, but also pushback from those wary of linking cannabis to adverse outcomes.
Cuomo expected that. “There’s always political energy around substances,” he said. “But the point wasn’t to demonize. It was to demonstrate that if you want to save lives, you need to take comorbid addiction seriously.”
What distinguishes Dr. Cuomo’s research is not only its scope—millions of patients across interconnected health systems—but also its moral urgency. He investigates not only genetic drivers of disease but also the structural forces that shape risk: the delayed screenings, the undertreated depression, the untracked relapses that quietly shorten lives.
His research delves into how behavior intersects with biology in shaping cancer outcomes. Whether in the domain of addiction, nutrition, or psychological distress, Dr. Cuomo has demonstrated that behavioral variables are not secondary; rather, they are crucial determinants in discerning who lives and who dies with cancer. His own work evidences that depression, addiction, and social isolation should not go unattended in the oncology setting, as they exert tangible consequences upon mortality, recurrence, and quality of life. By integrating behavioral data into clinical models, he has helped redefine what comprehensive cancer care must include.
Dr. Cuomo approaches each dataset with analytical precision, driven by a conviction that the patterns buried in clinical records can reveal urgent, overlooked truths. This work entails caution with methods and a propensity to question what others do not—for example, in health behaviors, health disparities, or in the progression of cancer.
He is also not foreign to the media, featuring on networks and channels from the Sacramento Bee to the Daily Mail.
But he remains rooted in the work itself. He teaches graduate students not just how to model outcomes but how to question assumptions embedded in data.
He is also, increasingly, a public figure in health science, advocating for a more empirically grounded understanding of addiction, not as a social vice, but as a biological force capable of reshaping cancer risk and outcomes.
“Addiction isn’t just a behavior,” he said. “It’s a modifier of biology, a filter through which cancer patients experience treatment, survival, and death.”
Dr. Cuomo is animated by a singular belief: that knowledge, when aimed precisely, is a form of rescue. His approach to science is not about affirming prior assumptions but confronting what the data actually reveals. He’s not interested in proving he’s right. He’s interested in finding out what’s true—and what people have been missing.
