![\"Kurk\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Trentharry-5.jpg\")
Kurk Founders Trent Scanlen and Harrison Weisinger.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPublished on\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJuly 13, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
After surviving non-Hodgkin lymphoma in their 30s, Trent Scanlen and Dr Harry Weisinger turbo-charged a herbal medicine into a global brand \u2026 just don\u2019t call it a cancer cure.<\/p>\n
Kurk Founders Trent Scanlen and Harrison Weisinger.<\/p>\n
Trent Scanlen and Dr Harry Weisinger have vowed to party on Ibiza for Trent\u2019s 100th birthday in October 2076. It\u2019s what you\u2019d expect the founders of a supplements company to say.<\/p>\n
But should they get there, it would be all the more remarkable for both having survived non-Hodgkin lymphoma in their 30s. And while they started their company Kurk out of their cancer journeys, they want to make clear they are not selling a cancer treatment.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are pro-medicine and we are pro-pharma,\u201d says Scanlen, a London-based Australian. \u201cWe\u2019re not ever offering Kurk for people with cancer. We take it as part of our preventative protocol, but we never say that. If anyone gets cancer, I tell them, \u2018Go to the doctor. Go to the haematologist. Do the chemo. Do what they say.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Having said that, they have a remarkable founders\u2019 journey which saw them launch in the UK four years ago, Australia two years ago and now into the US, claiming total sales of $10 million globally and winning coveted research grants to look further into its efficacy. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Specsavers<\/p>\n
Scanlen was a business grad who went to London the day he graduated from Wollongong university in 2000. He landed at Specsavers, the optometry disruptor founded by Doug and Mary Perkins in Guernsey in 1984, where he rose through the ranks and bought a few franchises.<\/p>\n
Until one day when Doug Perkins pulled him aside. \u201cWe want to take on OPSM in Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Kurk](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Trent.png\")
Kurk co-founder Trent Scanlen.<\/p>\n
\u201cMan, we have to,\u201d Scanlen recalls answering.<\/p>\n
Five weeks later he was back in Australia, culminating in Specsavers opening 100 stores in 100 days.<\/p>\n
Scanlen isn\u2019t religious but he believes the universe delivers. During that period when they were flooding the zone, Perkins told Scanlen he had to go meet the \u201cDr Doctor\u201d.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s a doctor doctor?<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a PhD and a medical doctor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Melbourne GP Harrison Weisinger had trained as an optometrist but pivoted into medical research, doing a master\u2019s and PhD in nutrition and neuroscience. He did three postdoctoral research fellowships<\/a>, including one at the US National Institutes of Health, but found it too hard to get research grants, so he pivoted into medicine and became a GP.<\/p>\n \u201cWe met for a coffee,\u201d says Scanlen, \u201cand it\u2019s weird, but I\u2019ve called him my best mate ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n Scanlen convinced Weisinger to join Specsavers\u2019 executive team. And along the way, the doctor told him how he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma during his residency as a newly qualified medico. Weisinger had experimented with various supplements \u2013 fish oil, multivitamins, creatine and magnesium \u2013 trying to stay well enough for the formal treatment to work.<\/p>\n And it did work.<\/p>\n Denial, fear, anger, opportunity<\/p>\n Three years after they\u2019d met, Scanlen was doing a lot of complaining, recalls Weisinger. \u201cHe\u2019d let himself go, fitness wise, as an executive at Specsavers. Then all of a sudden he got serious about training and took up jujitsu. He was bitching and moaning. He was complaining of his sore back and sore everything. He just complained too much.\u201d<\/p>\n Weisinger saw him smashing the painkillers one day and, after asking a few doctorly questions, sent him for a scan.<\/p>\n \u201cThree hours after the scan,\u201d recalls Scanlen, \u201cI\u2019m in a cancer ward, people coughing and spluttering.\u201d<\/p>\n Weisinger was able to guide him through the journey, pointing him to the best doctors and giving emotional support. \u201cYou develop tunnel vision in that world. It\u2019s very hard to think about the future when you\u2019ve got cancer. It\u2019s just shit scary. You feel ripped off and angry and in denial.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sore every day, I\u2019ve got a bit of a pain problem where I had the radiation in the hip. I\u2019ve got arthritis in the fingers.\u201d<\/p>\n Trent Scanlen<\/p>\n \u201cBut ultimately, guys like us just get on with it, and that\u2019s what we did,\u201d says Weisinger. They resolved to look at it as an opportunity. \u201cMy whole practice is about preventative medicine and early detection \u2026 So I spend my whole day thinking about how to keep people healthy and keep them out of hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n Scanlen was taking 14 drugs on top of his chemo \u2013 sleep tablets, anti-nausea, anti-anxiety, antidepressants \u2013 blocking side effects and fear.<\/p>\n It got them looking at natural compounds as alternatives.<\/p>\n Scanlen would bring ideas to Weisinger, some of which the doctor dismissed out of hand as unscientific. Others, he\u2019d look into.<\/p>\n They wanted to do something with the cannabis derivatives CBD and THC, but the laws around them were restrictive. And neither did anything for inflammation.<\/p>\n They eventually landed on curcumin. \u201cAt the time, it had some 20,000 publications<\/a> listed on PubMed, half of which were in cancer research,\u201d says Weisinger. \u201cThe other half were in inflammatory pathways and inflammation research. There are now about 30,000 papers on curcumin<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Curcumin is the active part of turmeric, which has been used in traditional Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine for thousands of years. And while it appeared to show some efficacy under scientific testing, it also had poor absorption by the human body. Only 3% of what\u2019s consumed gets taken in, says Weisinger.<\/p>\n The big unlock would be in finding a way to increase that.<\/p>\n They set up a lab and met with former Macquarie Bank executive director Bill Moss who suffers a rare, incurable genetic disorder that causes progressive muscle wasting. Moss\u2019s Boston Global Group devotes a lot of funding towards health research.<\/p>\n Moss invested and his daughter, Natalie Cooney, joined the board of the new entity, Kurk Australia Pty Ltd.<\/p>\n They tried ways of crushing the curcumin crystal down to the sub-micron level to make it smaller and more absorbable. They mixed it with oil and black pepper. But the needle hardly moved.<\/p>\n \u201cThen a German pharmaceutical company, NovaSOL, cracked that in 2022,\u201d says Scanlen. \u201cHarry calls me up. \u2018A paper\u2019s just dropped. It\u2019s incredible. We\u2019ve got to change everything.\u2019<\/p>\n NovaSOL had figured out how to encapsulate curcumin inside microscopic, water-soluble spheres called micelles. They were claiming their product was 95% absorbable.<\/p>\n But they were doing it with synthetic surfactants and solvents. Weisinger and Scanlen vowed to do the same thing with plant-based ingredients.<\/p>\n \u201cTrent was far more steadfast in this than me, and I\u2019m glad we stuck to our guns,\u201d says Weisinger, \u201cbut we committed to being completely plant-based, and that wasn\u2019t easy.\u201d<\/p>\n A US organic chemist cracked it for them, but they have not patented the process because that would involve\u00a0 showing how they did it, inviting imitators to copy the process with small tweaks to beat the patent.<\/p>\n They launched in the UK four years ago, Australia two years ago and have built out a US supply chain. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a big study in the US due next month. Each market we\u2019re in, we want research partnerships. We want to show safety, efficacy,\u201d says Weisinger.<\/p>\n Kurk was recently awarded a\u00a0research grant by the government-funded Innovate UK, in collaboration with\u00a0Swansea University Medical School.\u00a0It will attempt to trace what happens to\u00a0Kurk\u2019s curcumin between the bottle and the cell, generating peer-reviewed evidence on its action against age-related inflammation. It\u2019s the second consecutive Innovate UK\u00a0grant\u00a0awarded to the\u00a0Kurk\u2013Swansea partnership.<\/p>\n \u201cI quit science because it was so hard to get funding,\u201d says Weisinger. \u201cThen, lo and behold, 20 whatever years later, we are winning funding for proper science with proper people. On our advisory board, we\u2019ve got an immunologist, we\u2019ve got a microbiologist, we\u2019ve got our food scientist in-house, we\u2019ve got this savant biochemist in the US.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve assembled a crack team of scientists and we\u2019re doing proper research, which is absolutely thrilling for me.\u201d<\/p>\n As well as Moss, investors include English actor Tom Hardy, English businessmen Jim Mellon and Lyndon Lea, and French footballer Patrice Evra.<\/p>\n Scanlen says they\u2019ve spent \u00a32 million in research and development.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m 50 in October, I\u2019m still doing jujitsu and lifting weights, and it\u2019s getting harder.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sore every day, I\u2019ve got a bit of a pain problem where I had the radiation in the hip. I\u2019ve got arthritis in the fingers. So I\u2019m trying to make this work for myself. Harry\u2019s older than me, he doesn\u2019t look it, but he is.<\/p>\n \u201cWe made that pact to live to 100 when I was going through cancer treatment. He\u2019s gonna get there first and drag me over the line, and we\u2019re gonna have my 100th birthday in Ibiza. Maybe you can come along as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Want to see more Forbes articles on your feed?\u00a0Tap here to make Forbes Australia a preferred source on Google.<\/a><\/p>\n Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world.\u00a0Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0become a member here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published on July 13, 2026 After surviving non-Hodgkin lymphoma in their 30s, Trent Scanlen and Dr Harry Weisinger…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542986,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,85,46,543],"class_list":["post-542985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-health","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-nutrition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/542986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Kurk](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Dr-Harry.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Kurk\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/10032602.png\")
The KURK formulation delivered by dropper. <\/p>\n![\"Kurk\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/New-sport-_-hand-_-tab.png\")
A sports targeted product with KURK plus echinacea and electrolytes.<\/p>\n