Innovation in the glass cube - the InCube Challenge 2026
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In the InCube Challenge, five students tackle a real-world brief from Roche in just five days: Exploring how digital health design can transform oral cancer therapy by creating a seamless adherence ecosystem for patients undergoing long-term treatment.
The 2026 Challenge: Empowering Patients through digital breast cancer care
The focus of this year's challenge is on improving the lives of cancer survivors — and those who support them — by eliminating the behavioral, psychological, and logistical friction points that cause patients to skip doses or abandon treatment prematurely.
The goal is to explore how intuitive design and smart behavioral mechanisms can help patients maintain motivation and commitment to their daily medication for the full duration of their prescribed journey, ultimately giving them the best possible chance for long-term remission and improved quality of life.
"As a cancer survivor transitioning to life after active treatment, taking my daily oral adjuvant Giredestrant at home is my primary shield against cancer recurrence. However, keeping up with a strict daily pill schedule for months or even years is surprisingly difficult. Because I feel healthy now, life gets busy, routines shift, and the psychological burden of a daily reminder of my past illness makes it easy to slip up. I don't need a complex system that tracks every symptom—I just need a single, seamless, non-intrusive experience that effortlessly fits into my lifestyle, safeguards my daily adherence, and helps me stay persistent for the full duration of my prescribed treatment."
Why it matters
Leaving the behavioral challenges of at-home oral oncology adherence unaddressed introduces critical risks:
Compromised Clinical Outcomes: Suboptimal adherence may significantly reduce the therapy's effectiveness, increasing the risk of cancer recurrence.
The Fatigue Wall: Without meaningful support, patients may experience psychological burnout and prematurely discontinue life-saving long-term therapies.
Undetected Non-Adherence: Healthcare teams sometimes remain unaware that a patient has stopped taking their medication consistently until it is too late to make regimen changes that can support best chances of a positive outcome
Missed Innovation Leadership: By failing to solve the behavioral core of compliance, healthcare systems miss the opportunity to pioneer a new, human-centered standard for long-term oral oncology support.
Solving this problem has the potential to unlock a seamless support ecosystem—maximizing patient safety, empowering survivors, and solidifying Roche’s leadership in digitally enabled oncology care.
A Partnership for Progress: Roche and IQVIA
The InCube Challenge is a collaboration between three key partners: Roche, IQVIA, and the ETH Entrepreneur Club. This partnership is designed to foster open innovation and pave the way for future co-creation by bringing together diverse talent and cutting-edge expertise.
Roche's Role Roche drives innovation to solve complex challenges in digital health and the patient experience. By tapping into diverse external talent, Roche gains fresh perspectives for real-world problems, acknowledging that breakthroughs often come from outside its own walls. This approach helps Roche stay at the forefront of the evolving healthcare landscape. |
IQVIA's Role
IQVIA empowers innovation by combining cutting-edge AI tools and data expertise to address healthcare challenges. By transforming complex healthcare data and real-world evidence into actionable insights, IQVIA helps enable strategic decision-making and identifies new opportunities for innovation.
About the InCube Challenge
InCube is a five-day competition organized by the Entrepreneurs Club of ETH. It brings together international and interdisciplinary teams, each composed of five students, to solve a specific business challenge. For the entire duration of the event, the teams work and sleep inside a glass cube placed in a public location.
This marks the fifth year that Roche has participated in the InCube challenge. The event is a collaboration between three main partners: ETH, Roche, and IQVIA.
A Look at Past Challenges:
Over the years, the InCube challenge has tackled various important topics in healthcare:
2025: Decoding Parkinson’s: Smarter AI for Better Care. The focus was on improving the lives of people with Parkinson’s disease — and those who support them — by transforming complex medical data and knowledge into practical, actionable insights.
2024: Enhancing the Patient Journey: The teams explored how to improve the overall experience for patients with specific health conditions. The goal was to make their path through diagnosis, treatment, and daily life smoother and more supportive.
2023: Tech for Better Vision: This challenge focused on helping older adults with the eye condition AMD stick to their demanding, long-term treatment plans. The student team developed a solution to support patients, and their work was so successful that it led to the creation of a startup, SightSync, which continues this important mission today.
2022 Making Health Tech Fair for Everyone: The teams tackled the problem of how we can address the gender bias in digital health and Artificial Intelligence?