The fittest founder got cancer: here's how he used AI to fight back

Conno Christou doesn’t leave things to chance. He tracks his sleep with a Whoop band, cross-references it with an Oura ring, and gets nearly 100 biomarkers checked every year. He had been doing the annual bloodwork for four consecutive years, following the protocols of longevity researchers like Peter Attia and Rhonda Patrick. He was optimizing his supplements, his circadian rhythm, his protein intake.

At 35, building his second company, he was as dialed-in on the latest in health research as anyone he knew. His last checkup, in 2025, was green across the board. “It was the best I’d had in years,” he says.

Then, after a workout, his arm swelled.

He didn’t think much of it at first. A week passed before he saw a doctor, who found two blood clots in his veins and scheduled surgery. But the pre-op exams changed everything. A doctor walked back into the room and told him the procedure wasn’t happening.

“We see an 11-by-11-by-8 centimeter mass behind your sternum,” the doctor said.

A biopsy confirmed what Christou had never before even contemplated. He had an aggressive, fast-growing form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — a rare diagnosis affecting roughly one in 420,000 people, caused by a random genetic mutation with no connection to lifestyle, diet, or stress.

The tumor had only existed for about three months. In three more weeks, it would have reached stage four.

“Lucky in my unluckiness,” Christou told this editor this week from his home in Athens, where he lives part time. “It was only found because I went in for something else entirely.”

What followed was an education in the limits of the medical system, and in what a determined patient can do about that with tools now available.

His first oncologist, a renowned specialist, recommended the lighter of two available chemotherapy regimens. Christou booked his first infusion three days out. Then, the night before, he sought a second opinion.

That second doctor didn’t hesitate. He recommended the harder regimen — continuous in-hospital infusion, cycling every three weeks across six months — citing Christou’s specific pathology. The lighter treatment carried roughly a 60% success rate for his presentation. The aggressive one brought that number to around 85%. Two world-class doctors. Diametrically opposite recommendations.

“As founders, we hold the wheel,” Christou says of the propensity of many people to accept what they are told — and why more should not. “You hear many things. You don’t have to follow the first advice.”

He didn’t opt to just follow the advice of the second physician, either. Over the next two days, he gathered 12 opinions in total — drawing on his professional network, reaching out to hematologists and oncologists in the U.S. and abroad, calling in every favor he could. Eleven to one voted in favor of the harder path. He took it. The decision, he says, didn’t feel brave so much as logical. He was already a data-driven person, and now the stakes felt existential to him.

Over six months of treatment, Christou approached chemotherapy the way he approached building a company, as a marathon of sprints — each of them with a finite cycle and each week filled with data points. He had done a mandatory 25-month military service in Cyprus at age 18 and he borrowed from that experience, too. He was going to be a good soldier, he told himself. Trust the process. Six cycles. Get through it.

He wore his Whoop throughout, and found it remarkably accurate at predicting the days his immune system would bottom out, sometimes flagging them before symptoms arrived. He kept a symptom journal using voice transcription, logging every shift, every side effect, every medication and counter-medication. He narrowed his focus to three variables: sleep, nutrition, and, first and foremost, psychology. (“It moves the needle more than anything,” said Christou. “I never asked ‘why me’ — not once. That question has no useful answer.”)

He fed all of it — blood results, scan data, wearable output, journal entries — into Claude. He’s far from alone in turning to chatbots for medical guidance. A public opinion poll released in March found that a third of American adults now use them for health information and advice. The stories accumulating online suggest that for some patients, AI is delivering what the system couldn’t.

Experts urge caution; Danielle Bitterman, clinical lead for data science and AI at Mass General Brigham, has told The New York Times in recent months that general-purpose chatbots are frequently wrong and “have not been thoroughly evaluated” for personalized diagnoses.

Christou doesn’t disagree. “It didn’t replace the doctors,” he says, but it “helped me ask the right questions.”

For a condition as rare as his — one an oncologist might see once a year — access to a model that had absorbed the full body of medical literature was, he says, simply not the same as a Google search.

The model proved critical at the end of treatment. His final PET scan — the imaging used to detect active disease — came back ambiguous. His oncologist began discussing a second line of therapy, potentially radiotherapy, near his heart and lungs. It was an alarming development.

Christou again did his homework. He read that for this specific lymphoma, the false-positive rate on end-of-treatment PET scans is around 60% — a statistic that still astonishes him. “It’s 2026,” he says. “Sixty percent.”

He fed all three of his PET scans and his MRI into Claude, which flagged a known but easily overlooked phenomenon: in patients under 40 recovering from this type of lymphoma, the thymus gland can reactivate after chemotherapy, showing up on imaging as what appears to be active disease. Given his age, his specific scan characteristics, the model put the probability of that explanation at roughly 90%.

He sought three more opinions. The fourth doctor confirmed it: thymus rebound. There was no active disease. No radiotherapy was needed. He was clear.

Christou is still unfolding what the last year has meant, for his health, how he works, and how he thinks about time. He built Keragon, his current company, before any of this happened; it’s an AI-powered platform that helps medical practices automate their administrative operations.

But going through the system as a patient has given him new perspective. He watched nurses and doctors buried under tasks that had nothing to do with care. He received the same chemotherapy protocol as an 80-year-old woman, the side effects managed through a cascading chain of additional drugs, each causing problems of their own. He says he’s certain that we will look back at this era of treatment and cringe.

He takes Sundays off now, mostly. He tries to be present — at lunch with friends, at home with his dog, in conversations that might once have felt like a distraction from work. A VC friend told him something years ago that he said he kept replaying during treatment: Be happy now. He says it’s among the hardest things to do and yet he finally appreciates its importance.

He says he’d be happy to talk to anyone going through something similar to share notes, compare experiences. He seems to means it.

“It’s not happening in 10 years,” he says of what AI can already do for patients willing to use it. “It’s happening today.”

Topics

AI, Biotech & Health, Keragon, TC

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Connie Loizos

Editor in Chief & General Manager

Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. Previously the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch, she was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series acquired by Yahoo in August 2023 and now operated as a sub brand of TechCrunch.

You can contact or verify outreach from Connie by emailing connie@strictlyvc.com or connie@techcrunch.com, or via encrypted message at ConnieLoizos.53 on Signal. View Bio November 4 Boston

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