Eleven Octobers ago, my wife Chen was 38. Then breast cancer. Surgery, chemo, radiation. Cancer changes things. Here’s one: we started reading ingredient lists. We didn’t know why cancer had hit, but we wanted to do everything within our reach to reduce the risk of it returning.

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I remember Chen at our kids’ bathroom sink a few months later, holding a bar of soap, reading the back of it, and asking me a question neither of us could answer: “Is this safe?”

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That ingredient list looked like it was written not to be read. Even if you read it, making sense of it took days of research. So I put my background in computational biology and software to work. The free app we created, Clearya, was meant to make that easier. It reads ingredient lists while you shop online and in-store, and flags chemicals you may want to reconsider based on scientific findings and regulatory restrictions. We built it for our family and gave it to everyone.

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In 2020 I wrote a post for Breast Cancer Prevention Partners (BCPP) asking what would happen if a million people verified every ingredient. Well, our app has been used millions of times by now. The messages we receive from cancer survivors, parents, and other users tell us how much that sense of agency matters. But millions of scans and better-informed purchases alone haven’t fixed the market.

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In September 2026, Silent Spring Institute published a study mapping where more than 900 breast cancer-relevant chemicals show up in the economy (Kay et al., 2026). Five hundred of them are used in consumer products: cosmetics, detergents, plastics. None of them got there by chance. The ingredient was chosen years earlier by a chemist, approved by a buyer, sold by a retailer, funded by an investor. When I looked for more ways to support the ecosystem over the years, I found that many organizations couldn’t answer Chen’s question either. They cared, but connecting the dots between thousands of data points for an organization is often as daunting as deciphering an ingredient list for a consumer.

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That is why, alongside our app, we’ve spent the past five years developing Clearya Insights, which helps researchers, agencies, advocates, and industry members gather relevant chemical, product, and market information and act on it. 

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And that is also why I joined the board of Clean Production Action. CPA’s GreenScreen helps answer Chen’s question before a product exists: How hazardous is this chemical? Are the alternatives safer? CPA’s Chemical Footprint Project provides a clear metric for companies to systematically measure and report their progress toward safer chemicals. Same question, asked from the seats where the answer can change what gets made. 

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Addressing the environmental drivers of cancer requires an integrated ecosystem. Science has been pointing in the right direction for decades. Data tools and a shared framework help us get there sooner.

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Chen still reads labels. The app makes it simple. The goal of our collective work is for her not to have to.

Contact hello@clearya.com for questions or comments.