The fittest founder in the room got cancer. Here’s how he used AI to fight back.
The fittest founder in the room got cancer. Here’s how he used AI to fight back.
房间里最健康的那位创始人患上了癌症。看看他是如何利用人工智能进行反击的。
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. Conno Christou 从不把事情留给运气。他用 Whoop 手环追踪睡眠，并与 Oura 戒指的数据进行交叉比对，每年还要检查近 100 项生物标志物。他连续四年进行年度血液检查，遵循着 Peter Attia 和 Rhonda Patrick 等长寿研究人员的方案。他不断优化自己的补剂、昼夜节律和蛋白质摄入。35 岁时，在创办第二家公司期间，他对最新健康研究的了解程度不亚于他认识的任何人。
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. 他在 2025 年的最后一次体检各项指标全部合格。“那是我多年来最好的体检结果，”他说。然而，在一次锻炼后，他的手臂肿胀起来。起初他没太在意。一周后他才去看医生，医生发现他的静脉中有两个血栓，并安排了手术。但术前检查改变了一切。医生回到房间告诉他手术取消了。“我们在你的胸骨后方发现了一个 11x11x8 厘米的肿块，”医生说。
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.” 活检证实了 Christou 从未想过的事情。他患上了一种侵袭性、生长迅速的非霍奇金淋巴瘤——这是一种罕见的疾病，发病率约为 42 万分之一，由随机基因突变引起，与生活方式、饮食或压力无关。肿瘤仅存在了大约三个月。再过三周，它就会发展到第四期。“在不幸中算是有幸，”Christou 本周在他位于雅典的住所（他部分时间居住于此）对本刊编辑说，“如果不是因为去检查别的问题，它根本不会被发现。”
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. 随之而来的是对医疗系统局限性的一堂课，以及一位坚定的患者如何利用现有工具来应对这些局限。他的第一位肿瘤科医生是一位知名专家，建议采用两种可用化疗方案中较轻的一种。Christou 预约了三天后的首次输液。但在前一天晚上，他寻求了第二意见。第二位医生毫不犹豫，建议采用更强力的方案——住院持续输液，每三周一个周期，持续六个月——理由是 Christou 的具体病理情况。较轻的治疗方案对他这种病情的成功率约为 60%，而激进的方案则将成功率提高到了 85% 左右。两位世界级的医生，给出了截然相反的建议。
“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 US 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. “作为创始人，我们掌握着方向盘，”Christou 谈到许多人倾向于接受他人告知的内容时说，并解释了为什么更多人不应该这样做。“你会听到很多建议，但你不必非要听从第一个。”他也没有选择只听从第二位医生的建议。在接下来的两天里，他总共收集了 12 条意见——利用他的专业人脉，联系了美国国内外的血液学家和肿瘤学家，动用了他能动用的一切人情。结果是 11 比 1 支持更艰难的路径。他选择了这条路。他说，这个决定与其说是勇敢，不如说是合乎逻辑。他本身就是一个数据驱动的人，而现在，这对他来说关乎生死。
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. 在六个月的治疗过程中，Christou 把化疗当作经营公司一样对待，将其视为一场马拉松式的冲刺——每个阶段都有明确的周期，每周都充满了数据点。他 18 岁时在塞浦路斯服过 25 个月的义务兵役，他也借鉴了那段经历。他告诉自己，要做一名好士兵。相信过程。六个周期。坚持下去。他全程佩戴 Whoop 手环，发现它在预测免疫系统触底的日子方面非常准确，有时甚至在症状出现前就发出了预警。
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. 他使用语音转录功能记录症状日记，记录每一次变化、每一种副作用、每一种药物和抗副作用药物。他将注意力集中在三个变量上：睡眠、营养，以及最重要的——心理。“心理因素比任何东西都更能改变结果，”Christou 说，“我从未问过‘为什么是我’——一次都没有。那个问题没有任何有用的答案。”他将所有数据——血液检查结果、扫描数据、可穿戴设备输出、日记条目——全部输入到 Claude 中。他绝不是唯一一个转向聊天机器人寻求医疗指导的人。三月份发布的一项民意调查显示，三分之一的美国成年人现在使用它们来获取健康信息和建议。
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. 网上积累的案例表明，对于一些患者来说，人工智能正在提供医疗系统无法提供的东西。专家们呼吁谨慎；麻省总医院布里格姆分院（Mass General Brigham）数据科学与人工智能临床负责人 Danielle Bitterman 近几个月告诉《纽约时报》，通用聊天机器人经常出错，且在个性化诊断方面“尚未经过彻底评估”。Christou 并不否认这一点。“它没有取代医生，”他说，但它“帮助我提出了正确的问题。”对于像他这样罕见的疾病——肿瘤科医生可能一年才遇到一次——能够访问一个吸收了全部医学文献的模型，他说，这与谷歌搜索完全不同。
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.” 该模型在治疗结束时发挥了关键作用。他最后的 PET 扫描（用于检测活动性疾病的影像检查）结果模棱两可。他的肿瘤科医生开始讨论第二阶段治疗，可能是在心脏和肺部附近进行放射治疗。这是一个令人担忧的进展。Christou 再次做了功课。他读到，对于这种特定的淋巴瘤，治疗结束时 PET 扫描的假阳性率约为 60%——这个统计数据至今让他感到震惊。“现在是 2026 年了，”他说，“竟然有 60%。”
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 las 他将三次 PET 扫描和 MRI 结果全部输入 Claude，模型标记出了一个已知但容易被忽视的现象：在 40 岁以下从这种淋巴瘤中恢复的患者中，胸腺可能会在化疗后重新激活，在影像上表现为看似活动性的疾病。考虑到他的年龄和具体的扫描特征，模型将这种解释的可能性定为约 90%。他又寻求了三位医生的意见。第四位医生证实了这一点：胸腺反弹。没有活动性疾病。不需要放射治疗。他康复了。Christou 仍在梳理……（原文此处中断）