David Fajgenbaum

Conqueror of Rare Diseases

David Fajgenbaum, MD, is the author of his national bestselling memoir Chasing My Cure. A physician and an immunologist, Dr. Fajgenbaum is the founding director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and the co-founder of Every Cure, a non-profit utilizing AI to identify existing drugs that might prove to be “off-label” therapies for diseases with no previous existing treatment. In 2012, while a third-year medical student at Penn, Fajgenbaum was dying of a rare inflammatory immune-system disorder called idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease that had no known cure. To save his own life, Fajgenbaum successfully repurposed a drug initially designed for organ-donor recipients to avoid rejecting transplanted organs.

Fajgenbaum and his team have repurposed existing drugs to treat 14 heretofore incurable diseases. More than 300 million people globally have a disease with no FDA-approved treatment. Of the approximately 18,000 diseases recognized by medical science, only 4,000 have approved treatments. For rare diseases that afflict too few patients for conventional drug development to be commercially viable, Fajgenbaum has pioneered an alternative approach using the power of AI.