David Fajgenbaum

speaker

1,017 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 26 Nov

David Fajgenbaum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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TED Talks Daily · How do you turn hope into action? A doctor and a public health expert answer | David Fajgenbaum and Celina de Sola · 26 Sep 2025 podcast

And this one we have to get to patients.

One of those diseases –

I talked about in my TED talk that I shared in spring is a drug called Leucovorin.

It was developed for patients on a form of chemotherapy decades ago and then used for another form along with other form of chemotherapy decades ago.

Turns out that a fraction of children have antibodies to prevent a vitamin from getting in their brain.

But if you give them this old drug that was developed to be given to patients on chemotherapy, it can help to get that vitamin folate into their brain.

And for a fraction of these kids, it can help them to speak, improve their verbal communication skills.

And this sort of thing where it's like, us humans, we made the connection, brilliant work was done, but the last mile wasn't taken.

And that's because it's a cheap old drug.

And it's not that anyone wants to suppress the information, it's just that no one's incentivized to get the word out.

out.

There's no drug company behind this.

And so these are the kinds of systems problems that exist that you see and I see every day, where it's like one little tweak here or there can really unlock a lot of value and potential.

I think if you observe a major problem like you did and like I did,

I think it's really important when you start to solve it to ask questions around what's already being done within the system.

Let's not try to reinvent the wheel like you mentioned.

Let's see what already exists.

And so I started asking more and more questions.

Physicians, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, you know.

there must be someone working in our system to try to find new uses for old medicines.

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