Dr. David Fajgenbaum

I mean, I almost died five times in three and a half years before.

And now it's 11 and a half without this disease coming back.

Wow.

Amazingly, you know, it weakens my immune system in the right way so that I don't attack my own organs.

Wow.

And I mean, the moment that that drug, the moment that I started thinking that drug was helping me and knowing that it was, you know, always there for something else.

And then certainly as the time went on, when I got to marry Caitlin and then as the years have gone on.

I've just gotten more and more obsessed with this idea because I'm literally breathing and alive because of a drug that wasn't made for my disease.

I just feel this tremendous sense of responsibility that like, hey, David, if you're going to get lucky enough to have one of these medicines help you, you sure as hell better spend the rest of your time trying to find as many more of these medicines help other people.

So that led us to then say, okay, we need to do more laboratory work.

We need to start uncovering more pathways that might be important, more genes, more proteins that are important.

And so we started getting really involved in that sort of laboratory work.

And in parallel, the next probably big milestone to go from like, okay, we help someone else with my disease was actually my uncle was diagnosed with angiosarcoma, which is a horrible form of cancer, the same week that my brother-in-law was diagnosed with ALS.

I went down to Raleigh to be with my brother-in-law, happened to be the same week my uncle got diagnosed with angiosarcoma, so I went with my uncle to his doctor's appointment, and the doctor explained, you know, there are these two chemotherapies, and they'll give you a couple months to live, but they're gonna stop working.

And so I suggested that we,

Start, you know, looking for drugs that could be repurposed.

And his doctor explained, like, there just there isn't anything for angiosarcoma.

I'm like, yeah, I know.

But like, there wasn't anything else for Castleman's.

I'm like, you know, I'm here.