The fittest founder in the room got cancer. Here’s how he used artificial intelligence to respond.

Cuno Cristo does not leave things to chance. He tracks his sleep using a Whoop band, compares it to an Oura ring, and checks nearly 100 vital signs each year. He’s been doing annual blood tests for four years in a row, following the protocols of longevity researchers like Peter Attia and Rhonda Patrick. He has been improving his supplements, circadian rhythm, and protein intake.

When he was 35, while building his second company, he was as in touch with the latest health research as anyone he knew. Last checked, in 2025, it was green across the board. “It was the best I’ve had in years,” he says.

Then, after exercise, his arm swelled.

He didn’t think much of it at first. A week passed before he saw a doctor who discovered two blood clots in his veins and decided to operate on him. But the pre-operative exams changed everything. A doctor came back into the room and told him the procedure had not occurred.

“We saw a mass about 11 x 11 x 8 centimeters behind your sternum,” the doctor said.

The biopsy confirmed what Christo had never thought of before. He had an aggressive, fast-growing form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare diagnosis that affects approximately one in 420,000 people and is caused by a random genetic mutation unrelated to lifestyle, diet or stress.

The tumor was only there for three months. In another three weeks, he would have reached stage four.

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

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

My first oncologist, a renowned specialist, recommended the two mildest chemotherapy regimens available. Christo booked his first injection three days later. Then, the night before, he asked for a second opinion.

That doctor didn’t hesitate. He recommended the most stringent regimen — continuous infusion in hospital, cycling every three weeks over six months — citing Christo’s specific pathology. The milder treatment had about a 60% success rate in his presentation. Al-Adwani has raised this number to about 85%. Two world-class doctors. Completely opposite recommendations.

“As founders, we hold the wheel,” Christo says of the tendency many people have to accept what they’re told — and why many don’t. “You hear a lot of things. You don’t have to follow the first piece of advice.”

He didn’t choose to follow the second advice either. Over the next two days, he collected 12 opinions in total — drawing on his professional network, reaching out to hematologists and oncologists in the United States and abroad, asking for every favor he could. Eleven to one voted for the harder path. He took it. He says the decision was not so much courageous as it was logical. When the risks are existential, you collect data.

Over the course of six months of treatment, Christo approached chemotherapy the same way he approached building a company: like a marathon of sprints, each with a finite cycle, each week filled with data points. He did 25 months of mandatory military service in Cyprus when he was 18, and borrowed from that experience as well. He told himself he would make a good soldier. Trust the process. Six courses. Get over it.

He wore his immune system all the time, and found it to be remarkably accurate in predicting the days his immune system would wind down, sometimes indicating them before symptoms appeared. He kept a symptom diary using phonetic transcription, recording every shift, every side effect, and every medication and over-the-counter medication. He narrowed his focus to three variables: sleep, nutrition, and, first and foremost, psychology. (“It moves the needle more than anything else,” Christo said. “And I’ve never asked ‘why me’ — not once. That question has no useful answer.”)

He fed it all – blood results, scan data, wearable outputs, journal entries – to Claude. He is completely alone in turning to chatbots for medical guidance. A Public opinion poll The study released in March found that a third of American adults now use them for health information and advice. the stories Online accruals suggest that for some patients, AI offers what the system cannot.

Experts urge caution; General-purpose chatbots are… Often wrong It has “not been comprehensively evaluated” for personal diagnoses.

Christo is no different. “This therapy has not replaced doctors, but it has helped me ask the right questions,” he says.

For a rare condition like his — one an oncologist might see once a year — arriving at a model that captured the entire medical literature, he says, wasn’t as simple as a Google search.

This distinction proved crucial at the end of treatment. His last positron emission tomography (PET) scan, the imaging used to detect active disease, was ambiguous. His oncologist began discussing a second line of treatment, likely radiation therapy, near his heart and lungs. It was a worrying development.

Christo did his homework again. He had read that for this type of lymphoma, the false-positive rate on positron emission tomography (PET) scans at the end of treatment is about 60%—a statistic that still amazes him. “It’s 2026,” he says. “Sixty percent.”

He fed Claude three PET and MRI scans to Claude, which pointed to a well-known but easily overlooked phenomenon: In patients under 40 who are recovering from this type of lymphoma, the thymus can reactivate after chemotherapy, showing up on imaging as active disease. Given its age and specific survey characteristics, the model placed the probability of this explanation at approximately 90%.

Ask for three more opinions. The fourth doctor confirmed it: thymic reflux. There was no active disease. No radiotherapy was needed. It was clear.

Christo is still revealing what the past 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 is an AI-powered platform that helps medical practices automate their administrative processes.

But going through the system as a patient gave him a new perspective. He saw nurses and doctors buried in tasks unrelated to care. He received the same chemotherapy protocol as an 80-year-old woman, and the side effects were managed with a succession of additional medications, each causing its own problems. He says he is sure we will look back at this era of treatment and servility.

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

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

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