Dr. David Fajgenbaum

And if AI can help us to figure out what looks most promising, then we can do the hard work afterwards.

We can work in the lab.

We can do the clinical trials.

We can do what's needed to prove it.

But let's actually start by using AI to make these matches.

And so Grant and I

co-founded a nonprofit called EveryCure along with Tracy Sikora, our other co-founder, which is on this mission, which is to save and improve lives with the drugs we already have.

And we start out by using AI to scan everything, the world's knowledge of everything versus everything, to find out the very best opportunities to take forward.

It's a great question.

And it ends up that it's so much more complicated than it should be.

And the reason it's complicated is that once a drug gets approved for one disease, it has about an 8 to 12-year lifespan.

lifetime before it goes off pad and it becomes generic.

So basically drug companies, when they develop a drug for one disease or a couple of diseases, they've got an eight to 12 year clock before it becomes generic.

And once it becomes generic, then anyone can make a copy of that exact same drug.

And they all make, there might be 10 people making the same drug and the price plummets because it's all the identical drug.

And so drug companies stop making money once their drug becomes generic.

So they have to think in those eight to 12 years, what are the diseases that are most profitable?

And so they tend to go after the most severe diseases because the most severe and the most common diseases, because that's typically where they're going to be able to charge the most amount of money.

So how common is it and how severe is it?

That's usually where they go.