One Drug, Many Diseases??? Dr. David Fajgenbaum, UPenn School of Medicine Professor and President of Every Cure
Flipping the script on the idea of for every disease, a drug. To for every drug, all the diseases it can treat. I'm speaking with doctor David Fajgenbaum, a professor in translational medicine and human genetics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the cofounder of Every Cure. And now, doctor David Fajgenbaum. Well, David, welcome to the program.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Thanks so much for having me.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now I learned from your website, which is everycure.org, that there are about 3,000 FDA approved medical treatments which address any number of medical conditions. And that's in total, 3,000 in that area. But to quote that website, no organization is responsible for ensuring that all approved medicines are used to treat
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:every disease they possibly can. And that's true. That's right.
Dr. Moira Gunn:They come through to cure a particular disease possibly can, and that's true.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That's right.
Dr. Moira Gunn:They come through to cure a particular disease or address it. Tell us about that.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Sure. I mean, it it's really been surprising for me to get into the space and to learn this. I mean, we think about the incredible effort and resources that go into getting one drug approved for one disease. I mean, literally, 1,000,000,000 of dollars and, in some cases, more than 10 or 20 years for one drug for one disease. And so you would just sort of assume that the work would be done to figure out all of the diseases that could possibly benefit from that drug.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:But, unfortunately, in our current system, there are incentives in place that would make a company pick one disease over another disease. And then once that drug becomes generic, there's really no incentives to find more uses for them.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So, once the patent goes off expiration, anybody can make it, then there's no real real big profits.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That's exactly right. There's no profit. There's no incentive whatsoever. I mean, really, once a drug is generic and over 80% of drugs are already generic, there's no incentive to to find more uses for these drugs. So the tools that are within our reach, the drugs that are literally on our pharmacy shelves to help patients are the ones that we're not studying.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:They're the ones that we're not fully utilizing.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now let me flip the question. How many medical conditions today are in need of medications?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:It's a huge number. We like to think about all the progress that we've made as a medical community, and and we should be really proud. As you said, 3,000 approved drugs. Those 3,000 drugs are approved for about 3,000 diseases, and that is really amazing. But depending on what classification system you use, there's anywhere between 9,017,000 more diseases that don't have a single approved therapy.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now these aren't just one offs. There's millions of people who have these diseases.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That's right. It's estimated about 1 in 10 Americans have one of these between 9,017,000 diseases that don't have an approved therapy. 1 in 10 of all of us listening and and part of the show right now either has or will develop a disease without a single treatment.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now you come to Every Cure. You cofounded it. It's a nonprofit. And what is it trying to do?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Sure. Every cure is on a mission to make sure that every FDA approved drug is utilized for every disease possible, and we're utilizing the world's biomedical knowledge. All the incredible work that's been done by pharmaceutical companies and academic groups and and others leverage all of that knowledge to figure out what are the possible uses for every approved drug. And let's go out and let's actually drive forward advance the trials to prove that they actually work regardless of whether it's profitable to do that or regardless of whether, the disease population is large or small, just what are the things that we can do to help people as quickly as possible?
Dr. Moira Gunn:I have to say, I can imagine you're sitting there. You have a you have a condition. There's some drugs there, but maybe not working for you. They're working on new ones. I mean, it just frost you to think, you mean, we have some drugs that might already work.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Yeah. It's kinda mind blowing. Right? I mean, and I know that we'll chat about this later on, but as someone who's gone through medical challenges, we tend to think that the drugs that, you know, our our doctors tell us about are are the only drugs that could possibly treat our diseases. But there's this whole literally, pharmacy worth of other drugs that have the potential to maybe treat us or someone we love.
Dr. Moira Gunn:1st, you're building a database, a drug repurposing database. What is it? What's in it? What's in that database?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Sure. So right now, it's about 70 different databases worth of datasets. And so, basically, the world's knowledge of what do we know as a as a human society about all the drugs that are approved? What do we know about all the diseases that affect humans? What do we know about all the genes in our bodies?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:What do we know about all of the ways those genes interact with one another? So imagine saying, I wanted to get, like, what the world knows about everything that could be relevant. That is in our, basically, database of databases, all that information in one central place.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And, of course, they're all different formats, different limits, different they're okay. So you've got a lot of it's a tower of babble of medical information.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That's right.
Dr. Moira Gunn:But you'll say bring it on. If it's good data, bring
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:it on.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:The more the data, the better.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now frequently, when we are prescribed a medicine, they're going by our symptoms. They're not really able to go inside and see the disease. So at what level are is some of this data?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Oh, that's a great question. So, the data that we're collecting is on every level from what's happening within the cell of someone with the disease all the way through how do patients perform or or respond to a drug in a clinical trial, for example. But in terms of the recommendations that come out of it, and and I know we'll we'll get to that in a minute, but that's on a disease level. So it's basically gonna say, for your disease, what is the rank ordered list of all 3,000 drugs in terms of how likely they are to treat you? You.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:So, you know, the first couple might be the first two drugs that are approved for your disease. The next couple might be a couple drugs that maybe have been utilized in a few patients here and there. And then the other almost 3,000 drugs are gonna be where we're utilizing artificial intelligence to help us to come up with a score for how likely that drug is to treat your disease.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So we got 3,000 drugs possible. And how many databases do you have?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:So right now, we're at about 80, but we're eager for people to donate additional data to us. We we really want to get as much data as possible. The 80 databases are fairly comprehensive in terms of what's publicly available. So a lot of times, when the federal government funds research, the requirements, the data be made publicly available so anyone can download it. We've gotten all those datasets.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:What we don't have are the proprietary private datasets from companies like Elsevier and Clarivate and Wolters Kluwer where they charge subscriptions for access. We're hopeful to partner with all of them. And if anyone from from those companies is listening, we would love to work with you.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Bring it on. Send us a password.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Yeah. Bring it on. Yeah. Exactly. Donate the data to us.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:You know, we're a nonprofit organization literally just on a mission to save as many lives as possible in the shortest period of time. And the way to do that is not to develop a new drug from scratch. It's to use the tools already within reach.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And I have to say, when we're talking about these datasets, frequently, we're talking about clinical trial datasets, which are great. They have a lot of information in them. And these are thousands of people over time, lots of data, all kinds of data, you know, from MRIs to blood test, amazing kind of information that you haven't even tapped in yet, but are relevant possibly to one or another drug or in one or another condition. This is an enormous, enormous task to just look at the size of the data and the complexity of linking it. I mean, there's some human in there that has to kinda do that translation so the AI can get in and do its work.
Dr. Moira Gunn:How do you do you just have a whole staff of people that are called inkers?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:I don't know how you do this.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:There's actually a whole field that's called harm data harmonization. And so we work with an amazing researcher, Melissa Heindel, who's at the University of Colorado, where she has a team of about 20 data harmonizers, and they literally look between all these datasets and try to harmonize the data so that it can be linked. You know, are we using the same unit for this? Are we calling, is it called Castleman disease or is it Castleman's disease? You know, ways to basically make sure we're all using the same language, the same vocabulary.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And so they're one of our close partners, and, we're we're thankful that they're doing the harmonization so that way we can make the connections.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Okay. So do the math. 3000 drugs, 80 datasets of all kinds of things, and you're looking for more. Lots and lots more. 20,000 diseases.
Dr. Moira Gunn:You know? You're not doing this on an Excel spreadsheet.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:No. Yeah. It's been it's been described by a few folks in this phase in this space. One recently described it, as, not a moon shot, but like a Mars shot. It's like further than the moon.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And and another person described it as as the Manhattan Project. And so, yeah, it's a huge effort. But to me, as a physician, as a scientist, as a patient, as an advocate myself, I can't imagine how we could have gone this long without ever doing this. You know, as someone who has benefited from drugs and also developed drugs for patients, again, I just can't believe that our society hasn't come together to say, we're gonna take on this Mars shot. You know, we're gonna take on this Manhattan Project to make sure that every drug is fully utilized.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And so after spending about 10 years, working within this space and trying to figure out who's doing this and learning that no one's doing it, we finally decided that we needed to do it.
Dr. Moira Gunn:You're listening to Tech Nation. I'm Moira Gunn. My guest today is doctor David Faganbaum, an associate professor in translational medicine and human genetics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He's also the cofounder and president of the nonprofit Every Cure. His 2021 book is Chasing My Cure, A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope Into Action.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, I said I was gonna ask you about this at the end, but I gotta ask you about it now.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:We're always asking, you know, if people are actually walking their talk. You did the
Dr. Moira Gunn:walk. If people are actually walking their talk. You did the walk, and now you've made it your talk.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:So we
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:just talked about your talk.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Tell us how you got here, and it's it's almost a miracle you are. Tell us about that.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Sure. Well, in 2010, I was a 3rd year medical student here at the University of Pennsylvania. I was treating patients. I, was was healthy, and, I on a mission. I wanted to become a doctor in memory of my mom.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:She had passed away from cancer a few years before. And, out of nowhere, I became critically ill. The same hospital I was treating patients, all of a sudden I was in ICU. All of my organs were shutting down. I was on life support requiring daily transfusions just to keep me alive, all with no diagnosis.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That lasted for months that I was in the ICU. I was eventually diagnosed with a rare disease called Castleman disease, where there were no approved therapies. And I I spent a total of about 6 months hospitalized. I had my last rights read to me. I, you know, just struggled with this condition, received a lot of chemotherapy, that was used for my disease.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And chemo kept saving my life, but then I kept relapsing. And, you know, about 2 years into this journey, I was in the middle of med school and I was, you know, dealing with this illness. I realized that I couldn't just hope that some researcher somewhere would find a drug for me. I mean, my doctor explained to me that he was out of options. He said, there are no more drugs to try for you.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:This is it. We've tried everything. And so I I know I couldn't just wait for someone else to find something that if I wanted any chance of survival, I would need to get involved in research myself. And so I created an organization called the Castle Disease Collaborative Network, and I got to work. I started performing experiments on my own blood samples.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:I started going through all the studies out there. We talk about the world's biomedical knowledge. I I probably read through the whole world's biomedical knowledge trying to find a drug to save my life. And, over the course of about a year, I ended up discovering an old drug called sirolimus. It's been around for decades.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:It had never been used for my disease, and I thought it might work. And, so I began testing it on myself. And actually, this month marks 10 years that I've been in remission on this drug that wasn't made for my disease. It wasn't supposed to be given me. I'm not supposed to be here, but because of that drug, I'm alive.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And as you said earlier, now it's my mission to find as many of these drugs as possible to save patients as quickly as possible.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Yeah. When they say, well, we don't believe you can do it, you say, well, sit down.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Exactly. I gotta sit down. Sorry. Exhibit a. Right?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:I'm like, yeah. Exact you know, you're right. Because there are a lot of people who are like, you know, this is, you know, this is too ambitious and audacious. You know, drug companies spend 1,000,000,000 of dollars to develop drugs. You know?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:How is your nonprofit going to gonna make a huge difference? And, yeah, exactly the answer is, well, we already have, and now we just wanna do it at scale.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Okay. So if I was in a typical pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical company and we were choosing drugs, we have we have a number of candidates. You're sitting there going, okay. Well, we're we've got all of these scores. And you recently figured out how many of these scores you did.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now let's take us from there because from there, we're gonna go down the plan. What what you're planning on doing?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Sure. So, yeah, I think there's 2 places to go, from those important comments you made. I mean, first off, when a drug company develops a new drug, on average, somewhere between 30 40 diseases are considered for that single drug. So drug companies, you know, have a promising product and they start saying, you know, is it this disease or that disease? As many as 30 to 40 are considered, and that drug company has to make really tough decisions to pick the 5 or so that it'll actually study in trials.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:1 will get an approval, and maybe they'll pursue 1 or 2 additional drugs to add to the label to make that drug approved for between 1 and 3 things. But remember, if you go back to the very beginning, now there's 20 to 30, maybe even 40 other ideas that haven't been pursued at all. There are great ideas. Some really smart people in the drug company considered them. And so so that just sort of tells you the vast potential here is, you know, the untapped potential of of every individual drug.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Now multiply that times 3,000. But then in terms of your question, so we're saying, you know, let's not start by just saying that sirolimus, the drug that literally saved my life, that it is you know, it's a it's a proof for 3 diseases. It's used off label for a few more diseases. Let's not start with the mentality that sirolimus is being used or could be used for a handful of diseases. Let's start out by just saying, let's look across every disease and let's look at the potential mechanisms of sirolimus blocks something called mTOR.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:It's a key communication line of the immune system. Let's look to see what diseases mTOR is important in. Let's look at all of them. Who knows if they've ever been studied before? And let's start making connections that way.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And so if you look at all 3,000 approved drugs and you use the categorization system, I talked about harmonization earlier. If you categorize diseases into one group, or or in one way, there are about 12,000 diseases. And so when we did that most recently, we generated 36,000,000 scores, all 3,000 drugs against all 12,000 diseases, so 36,000,000 possibilities.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Okay.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:I think I'll start tomorrow. I'm very tired today. 36,000,000.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:I know.
Dr. Moira Gunn:That's like, okay. Every everybody take a drug.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:We everybody take 1. We only need 36,000,000 volunteers. You know, it's like, okay. Okay.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So you're like, alright. Now
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:we gotta narrow this down. What's the next step?
Dr. Moira Gunn:Where are you trying to go with that?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:So now when you got 36,000,000 scores, it's from 0 to 1. So the scores that are zeros are where we think that you know, for example, a toenail fungus drug to treat pancreatic cancer. Right? No mechanistic reason for why that toenail fungus drug is gonna treat, pancreatic cancer. Those are gonna get zeros.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:We're they're we're certainly gonna, you know, throw them out. Right?
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now if I if I can just interrupt you or ask you for a second here, when you say mechanism, is mechanistic, you mean how it the drug works in your system and how cancer works that those 2 don't match.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That's right. Yeah. That's exactly right. So a great mechanistic link would be so in Castleman disease, the disease I mentioned that I have, we've discovered that that communication line mTOR is important in Castleman. It's too high.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:There's too much mTOR. Well, sirolimus works by inhibiting mTOR, so there's a mechanistic link. The disease has too much of something and the drug reduces that thing. So that's a nice mechanistic link. You know, too much and then the drug reduces it.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And I used a random example of pancreatic cancer and antifungal medication. There's no evidence that fungi play any role in pancreatic cancer, so there's a really poor link between an antifungal and a and a and a pancreatic cancer, for example. So a lot of low scores. But, as you look across every drug versus every disease, you start finding these matches where there's knowledge that exists within the world that maybe you or I haven't ever come across that study. But if you actually unleash AI across everything the world has ever studied, you start finding these lengths that actually, no pancreatic cancer doesn't have any role of fungi, but this one protein in that's involved in the in in the development of this cancer could be inhibited by a a drug that increases hair growth.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Who knows? Right? And so you start making a connection between a hair growth drug and pancreatic cancer because there's a mechanistic link. There's a protein that's important to the cancer, and there's, and that drug does something to that protein that that could be helpful for the disease. And so now you've got all 36,000,000 scores.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:You got a lot of zeros, but you've got a lot of point ones and point twos. And you start getting interested when you see the point sevens, the point eights, the point nines. And so that's where we start digging in or the point sevens, eights, and nines because, basically, our AI algorithm is telling us, hey. If it's a point 7 or higher, you should really look into that because there might be something here. The world's knowledge is telling me that there's an interesting pattern
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:here.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So then you say, out of 36,000,000, how many should we look at first?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Yeah. So we we we talk about it in terms of the the top 10% as a starting place, which ends up being about the sevens the point sevens, point eights, point nines. So now you're you're somewhere around 3 to 4000000. And then you start applying filters to that number. And so you might say, I don't wanna look at any of those diseases where there's already an approved drug.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:So let's take out all of the hits where there's already an approved drug because we wanna go after the diseases where no one is being helped. Right? So let's just let's just take out all the ones with an approved drug. The next thing you could say is, I wanna take out all the expensive drugs because I know that if I found a repurposing match and it's an inexpensive drug, I know it'll be easier to get it to patients. So let's just wipe out all the drugs that cost more than a $100,000 a year.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:So now you're gonna start, you know, filtering down, lowering your number. You could say, I wanna just include drugs that are really, really safe. Because if I'm gonna repurpose a drug, I don't wanna ever cause any harm. I mean, with every cure, we're here to cure people. We're not here to hurt anyone.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:So so let's just wipe out all the drugs that have, you know, not great safety profiles. And so you can imagine you start applying these filters and you get down to a more manageable number. And then with that manageable number, humans then start going through and say, wow. Arginine for sickle cell disease. That's a really safe drug.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:It's really inexpensive. Sickle cell is a horrible disease. I like that hit, and that actually is one of our top hits right now. And so, you know, you basically and then you start having humans go through and you really say, I like this and then is this better than that? And then the fun really starts happening where where you have the opportunity to to, you know, decide which ones do you wanna take forward.
Dr. Moira Gunn:One thing we have to understand is that you have to take these drugs. Even though they've been approved, you've got to take them through clinical trials for the diseases and the conditions that you're talking about. That still costs money and takes time.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That's right. And you're you're exactly right. You still have to prove out that the drug works. So even if there's this really clear mechanistic link where this drug almost certainly is gonna work for this disease, you still gotta prove it. You know, you gotta do either a a rigorous clinical trial or in some rare cases, if the drug's already being given to patients let's say let's say some doctor at Penn is giving all of her patients arginine for sickle cell disease, and she's treated 200 patients of sickle cell disease, and they all are doing great on arginine.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:We may not need to do a large randomized controlled trial. We could package that data up, basically do a large what's called a case series where you describe, hey. The use of arginine, this cheap, generic, inexpensive drug widely available, is helping all these kids who are suffering from sickle cell disease, and that might actually be enough to persuade an insurance company to cover because it's such an inexpensive drug. Now if it's an expensive drug, you sure as heck better do a clinical trial because to persuade an insurance company to pay for an expensive drug to be used in a way that it wasn't initially intended, you better really prove it out with the trial.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And we've all heard the term off label.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Yes.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So that doctor that you were just describing
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Yes.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Was likely prescribing it off label. Yes. So we have some indicators.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Yeah. Exactly. Let's talk about that a bit. So, you know, when a drug gets FDA approval, it gets approved for a specific disease that goes on the label. So siltuximab got approved for Castleman.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:If you look at the label for siltuximab, it says Castleman's on it. To use that drug off label and what's amazing is every doctor in the US can prescribe any drug for any disease that they want. There's no rules. Once once it's approved for something, I can I can prescribe that for anything I want? The big question is whether the insurance company will pay for it.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Of course, if it's an inexpensive drug, it's much easier to persuade an insurance company. If it's an expensive drug, it's harder to persuade them to cover, off label use.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now we're we're gonna go down. We're gonna figure this out. I know you have some goals for how many you're gonna try to do in the next how many years? You're thinking a 5 year plan.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That's right.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Of course, 5 year plan keeps moving. As as time goes on, the 5 year goes out. Yeah. And, you're hoping to do 25 of these clinical trials. What do you think?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:In the next 5 years, we would like to, advance 25 treatments for new diseases that weren't previously being treated. And just to give you a perspective, if we're able to achieve that really ambitious goal, that would put us on par with you name big drug company in terms of their productivity on a per on a, you know, 5 year basis. So Eli Lilly, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, about 5 or so new approvals a year. We wanna do that. We wanna do that with, you know, less than 1 1 thousandth of the budget.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And the way we're gonna do that with less than 1 1 thousandth of the budget is because we're just gonna go after drugs that are already on the market. They're already FDA approved. They don't need any of the prior preclinical studies. They don't need nearly as many clinical trial patients because it's already been approved for one thing. And we wanna focus on the diseases that have been neglected where, you know, no one has gone after that disease and using the drugs that are neglected as well because they're inexpensive and they're generic.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:And so for all these reasons, we're able to mobilize resources in ways that, the drug companies just aren't able to based on the way the system is set up. But, man, you know, are there a lot of patients waiting for these solutions?
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now you would be mistaken if you thought that every cure was just a lovely lovely, you know, building with a nice parking lot and greenery around and, and all the work is going on inside the building. Every cure is a pretty small outfit with a lot of collaboration, big and small. Everyone can collaborate from an individual up to a huge pharmaceutical company, up to an institute, up to a university, up to a researcher with a lab bench. Let's talk about all the various ways, you know, just sort of quickly is, like, how can various entities, organizations, and individual humans actually participate?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Oh, I love this question. Yeah. We I mean, we we called it every CURE because we wanna be as inclusive as possible. It's all of us. You know?
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:We at one point, we thought about calling it the CURE Collective or the CURE Collaborative because it's really about bringing all of us together. And so, yeah, what are a few ways the different, listeners could be involved? So first off, every single patient, every per that means every person in the United States and beyond that has ever received a drug off label or repurposed, so a drug for something that it wasn't intended for. And by the way, 20% of all prescriptions that are written every day are for off label uses. So so probably everyone listening right now has received a drug off label.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:But, truly, everyone who, who has an idea or has maybe benefited from an off label drug or they have an idea about a repurposed drug, we want you to share those with us. Right now, it's at everycure.org. In the future, we'll have likely have a separate portal specifically. But if you go to everycure.org, you can share with us about how you might think that, folic acid might be a great drug for your lupus, or I I I don't know what it might be. But but you share those with us.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:We want you to share those with us because we wanna be that entity that just drives great ideas forward. So so anyone can share ideas with us, whether you're a patient, you're a physician, and you've given it to your patients, you're a researcher, and you have ideas, share those ideas with us. We we want you to do that. If you are a health care organization, so let's say you have access to data, genomic data, proteomic data, drugs screen data, that could be useful for us, that could go into that knowledge graph, please share it with us. You know, if you are a company that has data like that and you license it out typically, I hope you'll consider donating it to us.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:We're a nonprofit organization, and we would love to highlight the fact that your company donated your data to us for free. We could utilize that. And then and maybe, one of the most important categories is if you're involved in clinical trials, so you're a contract research organization, or you, serve as a site for clinical trials, we would love to work with you because we the the most expensive part of this whole equation, as you mentioned earlier, is the clinical trials. And so if we can partner with groups that can do clinical trials efficiently, can maybe provide discounted pricing to our organization, that's gonna help us to do more clinical trials for less dollars. And so as you can tell, pretty much anyone and everyone could contribute to us, and we hope you all will.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And, of course, this is a nonprofit. Donations are always welcome.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:That's correct.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So just please know that. Please know that.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Everycure.org. That's
Dr. Moira Gunn:right. Everycure.org. I wanna thank you so much, David, for coming in. And you know we'll do we'll do anything we can for you, and, please come back. You know, you're always welcome on Tech Nation.
Dr. David Fajgenbaum:Well, thank you so much for having me and just highlighting this incredible opportunity, that I I never, could have imagined the potential out there to help a lot of people. And, of course, as I laid in my hospital bed 13 years ago, I never thought that I'd be talking with you, today and share about this this, you know, where we are. And and I really hope, as as I look to the future that, you know, 5 years from now, we can look back and and we can see the 25 diseases, that we're treating now with repurposed drugs and just, so excited about the the opportunity to help a lot of people and hope that everyone listening, will join on this mission.
Dr. Moira Gunn:My guest today is University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine professor, doctor David Fajgenbaum. He's the cofounder and president of Every Cure. More information is available on the web at everycure.org. That's everycure.org. His 2021 book, Chasing My Cure, A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope Into Action, is published by Ballantine.
