Every Cure is on a mission to alleviate suffering for the 300M people globally battling diseases with no approved treatments. We accomplish this by unlocking the full potential of every existing drug to treat every disease it possibly can; this is humanity’s greatest opportunity for rapidly saving lives.
Patients around the world die every day from diseases that could have been cured by a drug sitting on the shelf at their local pharmacy. Unfortunately, no one knows to try these drugs because no systematic efforts have been made to unlock the full potential of their use across diseases. Though many diseases share common mechanisms and can benefit from the same drugs, the ~3,000 FDA-approved treatments are only approved for ~3,000 human diseases and another ~9,000 diseases affecting millions of people do not have any approved treatments. The current model requires $1-2B and 10-15 years to develop a single new FDA-approved drug. Repurposing safe, widely available drugs for new indications is faster and less expensive, with the greatest return on investment for saving lives.
Repurposing drugs has proven effective for Castleman disease (CD) and other conditions. Our co-founder Dr. David Fajgenbaum nearly died five times from CD before discovering that the inexpensive transplant drug sirolimus was also effective for CD. This discovery has saved countless patients’ lives, including Dr. Fajgenbaum’s and inspired the creation of Every Cure. Our team has identified 9 other CD treatments as well as treatments for cancer and COVID-19, including guiding the selection of drugs for the groundbreaking ACTIV-6 clinical trial. Incredibly, dexamethasone and tocilizumab, which were rapidly repurposed as treatments for COVID-19, have likely saved the most lives during this pandemic.
Unfortunately, insufficient incentives, siloed data, misaligned stakeholders, and other market failures have impeded the identification of all potential uses for all drugs, especially low-cost, generic drugs. The incomplete utilization of existing drugs and focus on new, expensive drugs has a disproportionately negative impact on individuals in areas with reduced access to medicines.
Society needs a systematic effort to identify the most promising drug repurposing opportunities and bring them to patients, which would save precious lives and enormous costs.