Dr. David Fajgenbaum

So that means someone's got to stand up and do the work, right?

It's like whether it's the government or some entity.

And so that's where we at EveryCure said, like, we figured someone else was doing it.

Like when I got into this, I'm like, there's got to be someone who's doing it.

And it's like, oh, wow, there's no one who's picking these things up once they're generic and finding more uses for them because no one's incentivized to do it.

So we've taken that up.

I think what you just described, I think that's the only way you can do it is that if you want to do this fully at scale, I think what you have to do is you have to incentivize these companies to say like, yeah, you get more patent life or maybe your drug that's off patent, you can get a patent back on it.

The thing is is that if you do that, you're gonna end up saving a lot of lives because that's gonna drive a lot of cures.

you're also going to increase the cost of healthcare because those cheap drugs that are generic, it's good for the healthcare system for them to be cheap.

Like that means that they go from being thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars a dose to like tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars a dose.

That's good for cost of our healthcare system.

So it's going to increase costs, it's going to increase cures.

And so like that's where the challenge is, is that if you incentivize that, you're going to increase, you know, pharmaceutical costs.

Now,

I would make a pretty strong argument that even though you're going to pay more for drugs, you're going to end up saving the healthcare system in the long run because people are going to spend less time in the hospital.

They're going to have less other issues, less comorbidities because you're going to be treating the actual diseases and they're not with the drugs we already have.

So it ends up becoming probably, I think, close to a wash or a cost saver.

What I think is needed is for the federal government to also just rather, one is you can incentivize the drug company to do it, or you can just spend on proving these things work and then use the cheap version of it, you know, use the drug that's already out there.

And that's basically what we're doing right now.

At EveryCure, we actually have a federal contract with a US agency called ARPA-H.