The most powerful inventor in the room had cancer. Here’s how he uses AI to fight.

Conno Christo does not leave things to chance. He tracks his sleep with a Whoop band, targets it with an Oura ring, and gets about 100 biomarkers tested every year. She has been doing annual blood work for four years in a row, following the guidelines of longevity researchers like Peter Attia and Rhonda Patrick. He was improving his supplements, his circadian rhythm, his protein intake.

When he was 35, he built his second company, he was as exposed to the latest health research as anyone he knew. His last test, in 2025, was green across the board. “It was the best I’ve had in years,” he says.

Then after a workout, his arm swelled up.

He didn’t think much of it at first. It was a week before he saw a doctor, who found two blood clots in his veins and surgery was scheduled. But the pre-op tests changed everything. The doctor returned to the room and told him that the procedure was not possible.

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

The biopsy confirmed what Christou had never even imagined before. He had an aggressive, fast-growing form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — a rare diagnosis that affects about 1 in 420,000 people, caused by a random genetic mutation unrelated to lifestyle, diet, or stress.

The tumor only lasted about three months. In three more weeks, it would have reached the fourth stage.

“I’m lucky with my misfortune,” Christou told this editor this week from his home in Athens, where he lives for some time. “It was only discovered because I entered something else entirely.”

What followed was an education about the limitations of the medical system, and what a willing patient can do about it with the tools available now.

His first oncologist, a well-known specialist, recommended the easier of two types of chemotherapy. Christou booked his first infusion three days out. Then, the night before, he sought a second opinion.

That second doctor did not hesitate. He recommended a more rigorous regimen – frequent hospitalizations, cycling every three weeks over six months – citing Christou’s special illness. Simple therapy had a 60% success rate in his presentation. The aggressive ones made that number almost 85%. Two world class doctors. Diametrically opposite recommendations.

“As founders, we hold the wheel,” Christou said of the tendency of most people to accept what they’re told — and why most shouldn’t. “You hear a lot of things. You don’t have to follow the first tip.”

He didn’t choose to just follow the second doctor’s advice, either. Over the next two days, he collected 12 ideas in total – drawing on his professional network, reaching out to hematologists and oncologists in the US and abroad, calling as many as he could. Eleven to one voted the hard way. He took it. The decision, he says, didn’t feel brave as much as it made sense. He was already a data-driven person, and now the stakes felt there for him.

Over six months of treatment, Christou approached chemotherapy the way he approaches building a company, like a sprint race – each with a limited cycle and each week full of data points. He had done 25 months of compulsory military service in Cyprus at the age of 18 and borrowed from that experience, too. He would make a good soldier, he told himself. Trust the process. Six rounds. Go through it.

He wore his Whoop everywhere, and found it surprisingly accurate in predicting the days his immune system would break out, sometimes flagging them before the symptoms arrived. He kept a symptom journal using a voice recorder, logging every shift, every side effect, every medication and contraindication. He narrowed his focus to three variables: sleep, nutrition, and, first of all, the mind. (“It moves the needle more than anything,” Christou says. “I’ve never asked ‘why me’ — not once. That question has no useful answer.”)

He fed everything – blood results, scan data, wearables, journal entries – to Claude. He’s not alone in turning to chatbots for medical guidance. A public opinion poll released in March found that a third of American adults now use health information and advice. Stories piling up online suggest that for some patients, AI is delivering what the system couldn’t.

Experts urge caution; Danielle Bitterman, who leads the data science and AI clinic at Mass General Brigham, told the New York Times in recent months that general-purpose chatbots are not good and “not well-tested” for personal diagnosis.

Christou does not argue. He says: “It didn’t take the place of doctors, but it helped me ask the right questions.”

With a condition as rare as his – an oncologist he sees only once a year – accessing a model that had taken all the medical records, he says, is not like a Google search.

The model appeared critical at the end of the treatment. His last PET scan – an image used to detect active disease – came back negative. His oncologist began discussing a second line of treatment, possibly radiotherapy, around his heart and lungs. It was a startling development.

Christou did his homework again. He learned that for this particular lymphoma, the false positive rate for end-of-treatment PET scans is about 60% – a statistic that still amazes him. “It’s 2026,” he said. “Sixty percent.”

He sent his three PET scans and his MRI to Claude, which flagged something well-known but easily ignored: in patients under 40 years of age recovering from this type of lymphoma, the thymus gland can reactivate after chemotherapy, showing in thinking what appears to be an active disease. Given his age, his specific scan characteristics, the model puts the probability of that explanation at about 90%.

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

Christou still reveals what was said last year, his life, the way he works, and the way he thinks about time. He built Keragon, his current company, before any of this happened; is an AI-powered platform that helps medical practices automate their administrative tasks.

But going through the program as a patient gave him a new perspective. He watched as nurses and doctors were buried under tasks that had nothing to do with care. She underwent the same chemotherapy regimen as the 80-year-old woman, the side effects of which were managed with a series of additional drugs, each causing its own complications. He says he is sure we will look back on this time of healing and immersion.

He takes Sundays now, mostly. He tries to be present – at lunch with friends, at home with his dog, in conversations that may once have felt like distractions at work. A friend of the VC told him something years ago that he kept replaying during treatment: Be happy now. He says it’s one of the hardest things to do, but he finally realized its value.

He says he would be happy to talk to anyone who is experiencing something similar to share notes and compare experiences. He seems straight.

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