In 2010, Every Cure Co-Founder Dr. David Fajgenbaum was a 3rd year medical student when he became critically ill with Castleman disease (CD). He spent months hospitalized in critical condition and nearly died five times before launching an initiative to find treatments to save his life and others. Dr. Fajgenbaum’s team discovered an overactive pathway in his immune system and began testing a 25-year-old drug to block it that had never been used for CD. He has now been in remission for over 8 years and during this time got married, was profiled in the New York Times, wrote a book about his journey, and joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania to continue chasing cures. To develop efficient approaches for accelerating drug repurposing for other patients, Dr. Fajgenbaum’s team at Penn Medicine repeated this approach to identify and advance additional treatments for CD, angiosarcoma, and COVID-19 with countless other patients benefitting from repurposed treatments.
On a mission to unlock the full potential of every drug
Co-founders Dr. Grant Mitchell and Tracey Sikora each bring years of experience in drug repurposing. After completing medical school and business school along with his classmate, David Fajgenbaum, Dr. Mitchell led a team at McKinsey & Co. to mine medical records and real-world data in pursuit of new uses for drugs. This work, done individually for one drug or one disease at a time, led Dr. Mitchell to understand the power of scaling these approaches to all drugs and all diseases. Tracey Sikora studied repurposed drugs in rare diseases, including Niemann Pick C, MPS I, Familial Hypercholesterolemia, and others. She led clinical trials by working alongside partners at biotech companies and rare disease organizations, developing study protocols that may adapt to the challenging realities of conducting clinical research in the real-world. Inspired by the innovative clinical trials launched for COVID-19 research, Tracey is bringing bold plans for efficient, well-executed clinical trials to our team.
Together, with partners in medicine, pharma, tech, and philanthropy, we are building out a comprehensive, open-source database of drug-repurposing opportunities.
Our partners and key relationships in saving lives
We are deeply passionate about uncovering repurposed drugs for patients who are suffering while there is a drug sitting at their neighborhood pharmacy, and want to scale drug repurposing to help each and every patient who may benefit by using an already existing drug.
Learn more about how you can help pursue this mission.