From a Mother’s Cancer to a Mission: Sean Kimbrough’s Story
I get asked a version of the same question constantly: How does a guy with zero oncology background — no medical degree, no research credentials, no clinical training — end up building a research partnership with MD Anderson?
The honest answer is that I didn’t plan any of this. But looking back, every unrelated detour I took ended up pointing the same direction. Here’s the whole story.
The Health Magnet years
My interest in human health started in 8th grade, when I applied to Dallas ISD’s Health Magnet High School with the intention of going to medical school and becoming an anesthesiologist — a path my mother suggested, and one I was genuinely excited about.
Freshman year was the fundamentals: medical terminology, bedside manner, basic nursing procedures. Then I was introduced to the school’s dental program, which went deep on dental laboratory techniques — tooth anatomy, casting molds, carving teeth in chalk and then wax. I took that training and went to work for a dental laboratory in Dallas.
Then, junior year, my family moved out of the Dallas ISD district and into Richardson ISD, which had no magnet program. My dental training — and the clearest version of my medical-career plan — ended there.
The Detour that Became a Degree
After high school, I enrolled at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University). I took the standard freshman lineup — biology, chemistry, English. Chemistry lasted four weeks. I still don’t fully understand inorganic chemistry to this day.
That same semester, I discovered rugby, which I remain convinced is the greatest team sport in existence. It did nothing for my GPA and eventually sent me back home to Dallas.
I enrolled at Richland Junior College to rebuild my transcript, and it was there I discovered economics — which became my major, alongside anthropology, when I eventually finished my degree. It was a hard pivot away from a med-school track. But the medical and health training from Health Magnet never fully left me.
Green tea, blue-green algae, and an honorary nutrition degree
After graduating, I married my college sweetheart. We were both genuinely interested in healthy eating and living — enough that we spent a stretch selling super blue-green algae supplements and talking up the benefits of green tea. That business didn’t go far. But the interest stuck.
My wife took it further and went to the University of Arizona to earn her Registered Dietitian credential. That meant years of studying college-level chemistry, biology, nutrition science, and diet — and, as any spouse of a grad student knows, it’s assumed you’ll be the study partner. I effectively earned an honorary degree sitting across the table from her.
I didn’t know it yet, but that was training too.
A career with no obvious connection to oncology
From there, I built a career that had nothing to do with medicine:
- Mortgages
- Insurance
- Heavy Equipment
- Construction
Not exactly the résumé you’d expect from someone who’d eventually be building a research partnership with one of the top cancer centers in the country.
The call that changed everything
Thanksgiving 2013. My son had been born that February. His mother invited my mother to join us for the weekend in the country — I argued against it, and got outvoted. It was not a good weekend. When we dropped my mother off afterward, she told me she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer.
I was floored. She had never smoked a single cigarette in her life.
Something broke between us after that, and it stayed broken for the next ten years. We didn’t speak.
Then, in February 2023, she called. Ten years of silence, ended by the news that the cancer had spread through her entire body. She told me she’d never had it treated — not once, in all that time. She’d finally stopped feeling well enough to ignore it, gone in to get examined, and come out with one option left: chemotherapy and radiation.
That call put me into overdrive.
Falling down the research rabbit hole
I started looking for anything beyond the standard path. I found Joe Tippens’ story — his experience with fenbendazole — and from there, ivermectin. I was all in. I sent everything I found to my mother, urging her to at least consider it alongside what her oncologist had already put in motion.
She wasn’t having it ….
“What do you know? You’re not a doctor.” My response was simple: “As your only child, I am the only person on this planet with a vested interest in keeping you alive.”
She moved forward with chemotherapy and radiation. She passed away in November 2023.
I’ll never know if anything I found would have changed the outcome. That part of the story belongs to her. But by the time I lost her, I was already too deep into the research to walk away.
From grief to a research obsession
I kept reading — NIH, PubMed, peer-reviewed cancer literature — and kept getting pulled further in by what I found. The momentum around repurposed medications wasn’t a fringe curiosity; there was real, serious science behind it, and real researchers taking it seriously.
That momentum eventually got me into Dr. Anil Sood’s lab at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where I began working to sponsor a preclinical trial studying ivermectin and mebendazole in ovarian cancer. We initially submitted for a Sponsored Research Agreement (SRA), but CAC didn’t yet have funding in place to support it — so MD Anderson recommended we formalize the relationship through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) instead, while we raise the funds needed to move to a full research agreement. That MOU is what’s currently in place, and the fundraising is ongoing.
The metabolism connection
The deeper I went, the more I found myself outside conventional standard-of-care thinking entirely. That path led to an interview with Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a cancer researcher with over 30 years of work out of Boston College, whose research frames cancer as fundamentally a metabolic disease.
It clicked immediately — and it connected back to things I already half-knew. The blue-green algae years. Being my ex-wife’s unofficial study partner through her nutrition degree. Suddenly the Krebs cycle, ATP, mitochondria, and metabolism weren’t abstract textbook terms — they were the thread tying my entire non-medical life back together.
That opened the door to the microbiome’s role in cancer and overall health. Then the genetic and genomic angle showed up too.
Turning the gap into the mission
I didn’t come from a medical or research background, and I felt that gap sharply. So instead of pretending otherwise, I built Courage Against Cancer around closing it — for myself and for every patient asking the same questions I was.
In my own research, I hadn’t come across another organization approaching the problem quite the way I was starting to see it: test the microbiome and the genetics, bring the results together, and use them to help build a personalized recovery and wellness approach — nutrition, lifestyle, and recovery guidance shaped around a patient’s own biology, developed alongside a coach, and designed to work with a patient’s medical team rather than in place of it. That thinking became the foundation of what’s now the CAC Wellness Playbook.
The full circle
Health Magnet High School →
two non-medical college degrees →
my ex-wife’s nutrition science education →
a two decade-long non-medical sales career →
my mother’s cancer fight →
Courage Against Cancer!
None of it looked like a straight line while I was living it. >> It looks like one now. <<
I’m still not a doctor. I never will be. What I am is the person who kept asking why patients only ever hear about one path — and who decided to spend the rest of his career building the alternative.
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