Meet the neurosurgeon-CEO taking on cancer drug resistance John Yu built Kairos Pharma on a simple bet: Cancer drugs don't fail, tumors just learn to outrun them. Written byAndrea Corona

Meet the neurosurgeon-CEO taking on cancer drug resistance John Yu built Kairos Pharma on a simple bet: Cancer drugs don't fail, tumors just learn to outrun them. Written byAndrea Corona https://www.drugdiscoverynews.com/meet-the-neurosurgeon-ceo-taking-on-cancer-drug-resistance-17566 DDN caught up with John Yu, the Kairos Pharma CEO about the mechanism his company is betting on and how he splits his time between the operating room and the bench. A neurosurgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center who still runs an NIH-funded lab there, Yu founded Kairos Pharma to chase a problem he kept seeing in his own patients: a cancer drug works well for months, sometimes a couple of years, and then the tumor comes back anyway. "I see patients do very well for about a year, maybe six months on a therapeutic, but they always relapse and their tumor almost always comes back within that period of time," Yu told DDN. That pattern, repeated across tumor types, pushed him to focus Kairos on resistance itself rather than on building another drug meant to outcompete existing therapies.