🧬 David Fajgenbaum took his final medical exam thinking he was going to die. He wasn’t being dramatic: his organs were failing. He had lumps in his neck, was drinking liters of coffee to stay standing, and when he left the exam he went straight to the ER. The diagnosis took eleven weeks: Castleman disease, a rare condition with no known cure. A priest read him the last rites. He said goodbye to his family. 😶
He survived by a thread thanks to last-minute chemotherapy, but relapsed three more times. Each relapse nearly killed him. The last one left him in the ICU for a month. By then he had already received the maximum amount of chemo the human body can tolerate. The doctors told him there were no more options and that the next relapse would be fatal. 💀
Then he did something no doctor had tried: he analyzed his own blood, identified a protein called mTOR that was triggering his immune system, and connected that finding to an existing drug called Sirolimus, which no one was using for that. His doctor had doubts, but prescribed it. Within days, the symptoms disappeared. Eleven years later, David is still taking that pill, has a wife, two children, and co-founded Every Cure, an organization that already has 8 active programs to redirect existing drugs toward diseases with no treatment. 🔬