David Fagenbaum
speaker
271 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 28 Feb
David Fagenbaum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You can think about it a bit like Netflix, which uses data on the actors, the directors in the movies that you watch and the interconnectedness between them to predict which movies you might like to watch in the future.
Well, we do something similar, but instead we use the world's knowledge of all approved drugs and all diseases and the connectedness between them to predict which drugs might be useful in new ways, much faster than any team of humans ever could.
And then we use artificial intelligence to look across the millions of drug disease matches to identify the best opportunities to reduce suffering and have the greatest impact possible.
Then we take those specific programs forward.
We study them in the laboratory, in clinical trials, and sometimes we go right to spotlighting them because the work has already been done to prove that they're effective.
Now, when we first were dreaming about creating EveryCure, my co-founders, Grant Mitchell, Tracy Sikora, and I, we knew all of this was possible in theory, but we didn't really know how we were going to turn it into reality or how we were going to fund it.
Clinical trials are not cheap.
But then I got an email actually from a member of the TED community telling me about something called the Audacious Project, which selects 10 nonprofits every year, solving the world's biggest challenges.
And just knowing that Audacious existed and knowing that this community here was supporting this kind of work, it gave us the courage to really take this leap and to start this organization.
We got started, and then we applied for funding, and we were so hopeful we would get it, and then we weren't selected.
But then we applied again, and just a few months ago, we received this really transformative funding.
Thank you all so much.
Truly, thank you.
Between this funding from the Audacious Project and also from a federal agency in the US called Arba Age, we are building an AI-powered engine to repurpose 15 to 25 treatments by 2030, and with additional funding to be able to repurpose dozens and even hundreds more treatments.
Now, we've only been running our full pipeline for a few months, but we're already helping patients.
The very first time we used a high-scoring drug from our algorithm was for a patient with Castleman disease, the disease that I have, but unfortunately, the treatments we discovered for me weren't working for this patient.
He was getting ready to say goodbye to his wife and his daughter because he was getting ready to be transferred to hospice care.
We recommended this number one drug from our platform, and amazingly, it saved his life.
He's been in remission now for over two years.
Thank you.
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