Dr. David Fajgenbaum

So I had, you know, about four months between getting out of the hospital and making it to our wedding day.

Like if you last that long.

If I last that long.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So I saw all those samples and I started doing something called serum proteomics where the idea is you measure 1,000 different things in your blood or 1,000 analytes or proteins in your blood and then we did something called pathway analyses where we try to understand what are the signals in the blood that are coming from these proteins being up or down.

I did something called flow cytometry to look to see which of my immune cells were turned off and turned on

And then cytokine panels where we measure these 13 different proteins and their changes in the blood.

And what emerged was that my mTOR was in overdrive.

And mTOR is a communication line your immune system uses to turn on, to turn off, to proliferate.

And

When I saw that result, I immediately remembered that there's a drug called serolimus, the other name for it's rapamycin, that is really good at turning mTOR off.

It's an mTOR inhibitor.

So like I saw the result and it's like mTOR is on and I was like, oh my gosh, isn't there a great mTOR inhibitor?

Wait, rapamycin?

Rapamycin is the drug that saved my life.

And I love that story.

I listened to that story, and I love that story.

And, of course, it's found on the island of Rapa Nui.

It was hidden in a freezer in Canada.