San Francisco, California – David Fajgenbaum, co-founder of Every Cure and physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, announces First Life Saved with AI-Discovered Repurposed Medicine for Castleman Disease with Significant Potential Applications to Treat Other Illnesses at STAT Breakthrough Summit

A patient’s life was saved after researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company, and Every Cure, led by Dr. David Fajgenbaum, utilized AI to uncover a previously unknown use for an existing drug, adalimumab, to treat idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD). Every Cure and its partners are developing medical databases and AI algorithms to unlock new uses for existing medicines across all diseases, and the latest scoring identified adalimumab as the most promising treatment for iMCD out of all 3,000 approved drugs.

iMCD is a rare and life-threatening disorder that involves hyperactivation of the body’s immune system which causes uncontrolled organ dysfunction. The only FDA-approved treatment works in a portion of those diagnosed with iMCD, leaving the majority of patients with limited options. Albert, a 50-year-old iMCD patient who exhausted all known treatments, was prescribed adalimumab by Dr. Luke Chen from the University of British Columbia after consultation with Dr. Fajgenbaum and his team from Every Cure, who had identified the potential benefit of this medication using an AI-guided proteomics approach.

“After a two-year battle with iMCD, I was unfortunately out of options, causing my family and me to prepare for hospice care,” Albert stated. The Every Cure team identified this treatment just as Albert began to exhibit the worst symptoms in his 2-year battle with iMCD. Within a few days of taking adalimumab, his organs regained function, his symptoms subsided, and he went into remission. The use of adalimumab to treat iMCD would be a novel application.

“I’m alive thanks to a repurposed drug that I discovered when I was dying from a rare disease during medical school. Now, I’m on a mission to unlock every cure so that no patient is told we’ve tried everything when a life-saving cure is sitting on the pharmacy shelf,” Dr. Fajgenbaum shared.