On his second visit to Israel in months, Amir Heshmatpour, the Iranian-born, LA-based CEO of Nasdaq-listed NeOnc Technologies, sits down with Jerusalem Post news editor Alex Winston to describe the two cancers he says he's fighting at once: the disease itself and the regime in Tehran.
Born in Tabriz and sent to the US as a child before the revolution, he recounts how his father returned to Iran only to be imprisoned and tortured by the new regime, dying at 46 and leaving a 19-year-old to step into his shoes. It's the grief that drives his conviction that change in Iran is coming.
The science is where it turns arresting. Heshmatpour walks Winston through NEO100, an intranasal therapy that bypasses the blood-brain barrier to target recurrent high-grade glioma, with progression-free survival measured in years rather than months, and roughly a quarter of Phase 2a patients showing total tumor remission.
He explains why he left a family office to run the company himself after losing his wife's brother to brain cancer at six, and how trials are expanding across the US, UAE, and Israel's Sheba and Tel Aviv medical centers.
What makes the video worth watching is how the threads braid together: a Persian entrepreneur with a Jewish wife, a friendship with Rabbi Pinto, a Torah dedication at the Western Wall, and a vision of a normalized Middle East he half-jokingly calls the "Cyrus Accords."