Cancer will strike half of all American men and one in three women in their lifetimes, federal statistics show. If you’re among them, your first reaction to a cancer diagnosis is likely to be shock, followed by some difficult questions:

• What do I do now?
• How do I find the right treatment?
• Where can I get the best advice to beat the disease?

Well, now, there’s an app for that. It’s called chemoWave and its inventor, Matt Lashey, says it’s the 23andMe of cancer treatment.

Lashey and his partner Ric Grenell tell Newsmax TV the free smart-phone app uses your own personal health information, compares it to other patients who’ve had chemo for the type of cancer you have, then provides advice on your best options to survive and beat it.

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It can be used to record specific information related to your health — such as symptoms you’re experiencing, how you’re feeling, drug schedules, and your medical records. It can then share that information with your doctor, family, friends, caregivers, without risk of medical privacy violations

Lashey came up with idea for the app while Grenell was undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2013.

In an interview with Newsmax TV’s John Bachman, Lashey and Grenell explained how it works and why it may be a game-changer in the war on cancer. Excerpts from that interview follow.

Newsmax: What was it about (Grenell’s chemotherapy) experience that made you come up with this product?

Lashey: When you see someone you love being so overwhelmed you sort of gravitate to what you know. My background is in data analysis. So I started tracking how he was feeling along with his activities and started to see the relationship between the ups and downs that he was having and certain medications that he was taking or how much exercise he was or wasn't doing. And … as we were sharing (this info) with his doctor that kind of motivated us to even track more things like what medications he was taking and when and when he was eating his meals.

Grenell: One thing I should add here is that when you're going through chemotherapy … to have someone ask you questions and kind of use the computer to input these questions and start to kind of computerize how you're feeling, it just seemed really hard for me to take in the beginning. (But) soon what I saw is that all of his computer programming matched against this big data was benefitting us because the doctor was like “Wow, this is really cool. We can see the patterns of what the side effects of your drugs are and maybe we can switch a drug. Maybe we can help make you feel better.”

Newsmax: Was that difficult? Because privacy is always a concern when sharing medical data.

Lashey: Privacy is definitely a major concern for us and all of our users' data is stored on a high trust network. So it's secure and then aggregated (so) that we can analyze it. And look for certain patterns and certain people that have had certain characteristics and how they might be responding to nausea medication A versus B.

Grenell: But all of this information is anonymous.

Newsmax: How did that help you be more proactive with your treatment?

Grenell: What we were able to do is kind of map out how I was feeling so…we were able to kind of present a graph and that's where Matt came up with the idea for chemoWave because I was waving. I was sometimes up. I was sometimes down. And presenting that information the doctor would be able to look and say, “well, I can see that on Tuesday you were very low. Let's look at what happened on that Tuesday. Well, that's the day that you went on a certain medication. The side effects then are correlated.”

Newsmax: It’s not just that medical information, but also what activities you did and what you ate throughout the day that’s also tracked here. That's also important for the holistic treatment of a cancer patient.

Lashey: Right. We had learned that exercise is very important for someone that's putting all of those drugs in their system and because we were charting everything out Ric could actually see how much of an impact being active had on how he was feeling not just the day of but for days after. And when he was laying in bed knowing that exercise would make him feel better that was the extra motivation that he needed to actually get up and do something.

Grenell: One thing that I realized pretty quickly is that water intake and sleep were really important and you kind of lose perspective on how much you're drinking during the day when you're going through chemotherapy. And so this helped me kind of figure out how much I was taking and reminding me, motivating me to do more for myself.

Newsmax: Have you guys been in touch with anybody about expanding past cancer?

Lashey: Yes. In fact, we've spoken to a lot of people in the research community and there certainly is application…for chronic conditions (and patients on) dialysis or people on HIV medication.

Newsmax: Why did you decide to give the app for free?

Lashey: We want to put it in as many hands as possible. It had an impact on Ric's chemotherapy experience. And so we want to make it available to people going through chemotherapy for free.

Grenell: And for my perspective it was very expensive to do but it was such a game changer for me to have this information. I want to make sure that as many people get to use this as possible. It was kind of a tough decision for us but we decided to make it available for free.

For more information: Learn more about chemoWave at www.chemoWave.com