In 2010, Every Cure’s cofounder Dr. David Fajgenbaum was a third-year medical student when he became critically ill with Castleman disease (CD). He spent months hospitalized in critical condition and nearly died five times. David was told there were no more options for his disease and waiting for a new treatment – requiring billions of research dollars and 10-15 years – was not a possibility. Repurposing an existing drug was his only hope. Repurposing existing drugs for new uses is possible, because many diseases share the same underlying problem or mechanism in the body and many drugs can have multiple mechanisms of action. David launched an initiative to find treatments to save his life and the lives of others with CD. He and his team discovered an overactive pathway in his blood and tested a 25-year-old drug called sirolimus that was approved as an immunosuppressant after kidney transplants but had never been used for CD, to block that pathway. As a result of this repurposed drug, David has been in remission for more than 11 years. During this time, Dr. Fajgenbaum and his teams at the University of Pennsylvania, Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, and Every Cure have advanced 14 repurposed drugs for multiple diseases, saving thousands of lives like Kaila, Michael, and Al.
On a mission to save and improve lives by repurposing drugs
Launched in 2022, Every Cure is on a mission to save and improve lives by repurposing drugs. We are pioneering a novel approach called Computational Pharmacophenomics that utilizes AI/ML to rapidly scan across the world’s knowledge of all drugs and all diseases to identify the best drug repurposing opportunities to advance to patients in need. Every Cure was founded to ensure that patients don’t suffer while potential treatments hide in plain sight. For the first time ever – rather than starting with a specific disease or drug to identify potential treatments – Every Cure is pursuing “impact-driven drug repurposing” which involves systematically looking across all possible repurposed treatments to find the greatest opportunities to impact patients’ lives. This data-driven approach maximizes the likelihood of success and the impact we can make per dollar spent.
Also for the first time ever, Every Cure is taking end-to-end responsibility for making sure the repurposed treatments we identify make it all the way to the patients who can benefit from them. We measure success based on the suffering we’re able to relieve for patients and the number of diseases we’re able to advance repurposed treatments for. We chose to be a nonprofit organization so that we could fill the gap in our system and pursue non-profitable treatments that are left behind. Between these pioneering approaches and our nonprofit mission, Every Cure is able to overcome the systemic barriers that have prevented our approved medicines from being used for all diseases they can treat and unlock treatments at a fraction of the cost and time. While traditional research would take years to investigate all diseases and all drugs that may be able to treat them, our AI approach is able to look across all 18K diseases and 4K drugs to quantify the strength of 75M drug-disease matches within days. Our team assesses the highest potential matches, generates evidence about effectiveness through laboratory research and clinical trials and disseminates successes in partnership with patient organizations, democratizing medical insights and reducing health inequities worldwide.
In just two years of operating, we have already launched 6 drug repurposing programs across a range of conditions and are having an impact on the lives of patients in need. The first patient we treated with a top scoring drug from our AI platform has been alive for over two years; this was described in the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times. We have also been able to increase utilization of a predictive blood test and a repurposed medicine to improve speech in children who have antibodies against the folate vitamin receptor and autism spectrum disorder (CBS Evening News). We aim to unlock repurposed treatments for 15 to 25 diseases by 2030.
We are grateful for the support we have received from our generous supporters, including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, TED Audacious Project, Flagship Pioneering, Lyda Hill Philanthropies, Elevate Prize Foundation, and Arnold Ventures as well as the federal agency, ARPA-H and countless individuals. While we are thankful for the support and impact to date, we have so much more work still to do. We will not stop until we create a world where no patient suffers when there is a treatment that could help them sitting on the pharmacy shelf. We hope you will join us on this mission.
Learn more about how you can help support this mission.