Dr. David Fajgenbaum

That's what I looked like, Sean, when Caitlin was offended that I was like, are you sure you want to be with me?

That tells you how committed she was to me.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Is she a medical professional, too?

She's not.

She used to work in the fashion industry, and now she's full-time with our kids.

She also helps a lot with Castleman's and Every Cure and Raising Awareness.

What was the drug that cured you?

The drug's called sirolimus.

The other name for it is rapamycin, and that's a drug that maybe some of your listeners will be familiar with.

Rapamycin is an mTOR inhibitor, and actually it's thought to have some anti-aging properties, and so sometimes people take low doses of sirolimus or rapamycin.

I take a really high dose.

My dose destroys my immune system.

Have you—

Yeah, so once it started helping me and once the months and the years started going by, right around the time actually I joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania to build a center to do more of this, basically to study the immune system, to figure out are there drugs that already exist that you could repurpose, that became my life's mission.

So I started that at Penn, and then we started treating Castleman's patients with this medicine, and it actually worked for the first three patients that we treated, and I was sort of like, oh my gosh, maybe we figured it out.

Maybe this is going to work for everyone.

It turns out that it works for about a quarter of patients, and so there's still more work to be done.

But, yeah, I mean, the first patient that I saw that we treated was this young boy named Joey who was in the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.