Dr. David Fajgenbaum

But I do believe that if there's a drug that could treat some of them or a fraction of them that's already at our CVS, we got to find it.

Yeah, you know, I mean...

There are a lot of drugs that can be used in multiple ways.

Viagra is a funny one because not only, as you mentioned, did it go from heart disease to erectile dysfunction, but it actually is also used for this rare pediatric lung disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Kids were dying because they weren't getting enough blood flow to their lungs.

And a random doctor thought to themselves, huh, if...

This can increase blood flow for these older men.

Could it maybe increase blood flow to the lungs of these little kids?

And then it was tried and it worked.

And for me, those sorts of examples were like, you would never think of pulmonary arterial hypertension in little kids as being similar at all to erectile dysfunction, right?

And it's because even though the conditions appear very different,

they share the same underlying problem, which is limited blood flow.

And so there's a lot of examples in medicine.

And there's another drug you've probably heard of called thalidomide.

It caused all these horrible birth defects back in like the 50s.

That drug can treat leprosy and also this blood cancer called myeloma.

And leprosy and myeloma, again, they seem so different, but they share the same underlying problem.

And so it turns out that just like you said, there are drugs that can do one thing in the body that can actually have an effect across multiple diseases.

And typically, this is discovered through sort of random chance.

Like this doctor I mentioned in Houston who was like, huh, I wonder if Viagra could be useful for these kids.