David Fagenbaum

Sure.

I might start back when I was a medical student.

I had promised my mom that I would become a doctor in her memory when she passed away when I was 19 years old.

And in my third year of med school, I was really on my way to making that progress, helping patients in my mom's memory

When I personally became critically ill with a disease called Castleman disease, I was so sick that I had my last rights read to me.

I spent six months in the intensive care unit and my doctors told me that we were out of options, but they gave me chemotherapy, seven different chemotherapies all at once.

And amazingly, those chemotherapies worked.

They saved my life.

But what they also did is they opened my eyes up to this idea that none of those seven chemotherapies were made for my disease.

but they saved my life.

So when I relapsed a year later, my doctors told me, we're out of options, you're gonna die from this disease.

I said, well, wait a minute, didn't you give me these seven chemotherapies that were made for my disease and they worked?

How do we know there's not another drug out there that could help me?

And so this sort of opened up my eyes.

I eventually discovered another drug that could save my life, but opened my eyes up to this idea that even when the world thinks that there are no more options, when the world thinks there's no more hope, sometimes there's a solution that's literally as close to you as your neighborhood pharmacy.

And David, how about you?

I love that.

For me, I think that the moment that that drug, sirolimus, which is the drug that ended up saving my life, the moment that drug started working for me, I started seeing my results improving, started feeling better.

I just haven't been able to get this question in my mind.

If this drug is working for me, how many more life-saving drugs are sitting at our local pharmacy that could treat more patients and more diseases today?