The often-hard reality of his upbringing has a lot to do with why Kyle Concannon, MD, enlisted in the war against cancer as a physician-scientist – and why he’s passionate about reaching out to the public to spread understanding about cancer.
As of August 1, Concannon is a thoracic medical oncologist at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, where he is launching a lab that will strive to overcome resistance to therapies in lung cancer. He was recruited to the CU Anschutz Medical Campus from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
And Concannon has brought with him his side project: Cracking Cancer, a video podcast on YouTube and other platforms. He says Cracking Cancer is “dedicated to breaking down the knowledge and cultural barriers between patients and health care providers. Our mission is to empower listeners with clear, accessible insights into cancer care and treatment options.”
Since the podcast launched in February 2025, the podcast videos have been screened nearly 27,000 times.
Getting where he is now meant overcoming challenges that began during his childhood in rural Vermont.
“We were a poor rural family,” Concannon says. “My dad was a janitor-mechanic with a GED. My mom stayed at home. They had five kids.” He talks of siblings who faced serious medical challenges, including one with a rare genetic condition.
At the time, he says, “my family’s health care literacy was really low. We felt helpless and victimized by everything around us. There was a lot of negative sentiment and blame toward the health care people who couldn’t fix these problems. I remember growing up hating that feeling of helplessness, watching my family suffer and not having anything we could do about it.”
The experience inspired Concannon to “want to be something in health care.” He went from being a C student in high school to an A student. When it came time for college, his parents were divorced, his mother wasn’t working, and his father had moved away. He got into the University of Vermont on a full-ride scholarship, “which was the only way I could have gone.”
Concannon found that “doing OK in a rural Vermont high school was very different from doing OK in a big university. I had to figure out how to study and get good at this stuff. It was a struggle, and I was supporting myself, so college was a hard time.”
Concannon graduated with a BS in biological science and a minor in pharmacology. Along the way, “I became fascinated with cancer. I thought about a lot of people with cancer who didn’t do anything wrong. Cancer just happened to them. The genetic component of something out of your control was an element I gravitated to.”
Next came two years as a research technician in a cancer lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We worked at overcoming resistance in lung cancer, and that’s still what I do now,” he says. “That was my first taste of applying the science into something that helps people. That reaffirmed my goal to go to medical school.”
Concannon returned to the University of Vermont for his MD, followed by an internal medicine residency at the University of Washington, where he also worked in a lab studying small cell lung cancer at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. During that period, he also led research characterizing the poor outcomes experienced by homeless patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) compared to other NSCLC patients at the same Seattle hospital.
Photo on left and at top: Kyle Concannon, MD, in the lab. Photo provided by Kyle Concannon. Right: Concannon records an episode of his podcast, Cracking Cancer.
Then it was on to MD Anderson for four years as a medical oncology fellow on the physician-scientist track, working in a lab focused on molecular drivers of lung cancer. It was there that Concannon started his podcast.
Given his background, and “coming from a low-income family that had very little health care knowledge,” it was important to Concannon to include cancer survivors as co-hosts of the podcast. Episodes cover cancer concepts, like stages and chemotherapy, and offer advice on preparing for a first oncology visit, supporting loved ones, and overcoming dark feelings and loneliness.
“I’ve learned from some patients that they look at studies and they know a heck of a lot about their cancers,” Concannon says. “This podcast is a way to minimize the intellectual hierarchy between providers and patients. We’re sitting down and talking about cancer topics together, and if we lower our egos, the patients can help educate the providers. They’re not going to know everything, but I want to minimize the idea that there’s some kind of academic barrier where people feel that understanding cancer is too far above them.”
Concannon also sees the podcast as a way to make cancer research more accessible to the general public. “Right now, it’s kind of a black box, and that breeds mistrust. If people can see what you’re doing, if they understand the trials and tribulations, that hopefully will get people more interested in it and see its value.”
Recently, Concannon was offered the chance to establish his own lab at the CU Cancer Center and an appointment as an assistant professor in the CU Department of Medicine's Division of Medical Oncology. He cites world-renowned medical oncologist D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, holder of the Joyce Zeff Chair in Lung Cancer Research at the CU Cancer Center, as a key factor in deciding to come to Colorado. (Camidge also hosts a cancer podcast, How This Is Building Me.)
“I met him at meetings, and he has always been very supportive,” Concannon says of Camidge. “He offered mentorship, expecting nothing in return. He’s been very selfless.”
He adds: “The signals I was getting from CU were that they were very interested in championing my career goals, which told me this would be a comfortable environment to work in, especially when you’re in your early career and you’re feeling vulnerable. You know you have the skills, but the environment matters a lot. Feeling like people believe in you and that they’re going to help support you in your goals is paramount.”
At the CU Cancer Center, Concannon says his lab’s research focus will be “the same as my earlier work: Overcoming resistance in lung cancer, figuring out why treatments don’t work and what we can do about it, and helping to the crux of the genetic component to a disease that people feel helpless about.”
In particular, Concannon plans to investigate driver mutations in lung cancer – genetic alterations that drive the growth and progression of cancer cells – starting with ALK-positive and ROS1-positive NSCLC.
“People who have an oncogene – a mutated gene that caused their cancer to grow – can have a unique susceptibility to certain therapies that work well, but only for a short period of time, and then they stop working. So overcoming resistance in those contexts is the big picture.”