#240 Dr. David Fajgenbaum - Can AI Find Cures to Rare Diseases Using Existing Medicine?
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Dr. David Fagenbaum. John, thanks for having me. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Hey, my pleasure. So, wow. You've had quite the journey with health. And... You made some amazing discoveries and I don't know a whole lot about it, but we're going to dive into all that. But thank you for coming. I'm really excited about this. And, you know, one of my biggest fears, probably my biggest fear is terminal illness. And we started diving into health stuff last year, you know, primarily about all the stuff you were hearing on the news about COVID. red dyes and all the shit that's in foods and the water and just everything and it really got my my uh my attention and so um i've been looking for somebody you know on on the subject of cancer and you're like right there so this is this is something i've been a subject i've been wanting to dive into for a long time so i just really appreciate your time and coming here
i'm so happy to be here and looking forward to this conversation cool well everybody starts off with an introduction here nice david fagenbaum trailblazing physician scientist and tenured professor at university of pennsylvania's perilman school of medicine channeled your expertise in immunology and drug repurposing to tackle some of the world's most elusive diseases Founder of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network to accelerate breakthroughs for rare hyperinflammatory disorder that nearly claimed your life five times. Co-founder of EveryCure, an innovative nonprofit harnessing AI to repurpose existing drugs and unearth hidden treatments for untreatable conditions. Best-selling author of Chasing My Cure that chronicles your journey and is now being turned into a film.
A TED speaker whose 2025 talk, How Nearly Dying Helped Me Discover My Own Cure, and many more, has ignited a movement to change medicine. A husband, a father, and now living over a decade in remission from Castleman's. And you have a great quote that I just wanted to share. The greatest cures often hide in drugs we already have. It's up to us to find them.
That's right.
Love that quote. Love that quote. So I want to do... A bit of a personal story on you, kind of a life story on how this all happened. I know you were a hell of a collegiate athlete when you got diagnosed, correct? And so we'll start there and then go through all your research, how you cured yourself and all that good stuff. But first, we've got a couple of things to knock out. Sounds good. Kind of funny because I was just talking about red dyes, but... Here's a bag of Vigilance League gummy bears made here in the USA. No funny business, no THC, no CBD. It's just candy with all the horrible shit that comes along with candy, but they taste amazing. My kids are going to love this. Right on. And then one other thing, I got a Patreon account.
They've been with us since the beginning. It's a subscription account, and we've turned it into one hell of a community over the years. They've been with me forever. and so one of the things that we do is we offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question this is from stephen casey what roadblocks exist in the current medical establishment to the types of breakthroughs like yours and what can the average person do to advance ideas like repurposed treatments off-label use experimental
use to change the industry that seems locked in tradition yeah i mean the biggest roadblock is that the drugs that we already have 80 of them are generic which means it's not profitable to find a new use for them and so no one's going to advance those non-profitable opportunities so someone's got to do it you know as you said earlier you know we're going to do that but what can you do you know as as he asked you can ask your doctor you know is there anything else that maybe is approved for one other disease that can maybe help my condition Connect with disease organizations for whatever the condition is that you or your loved one has. They oftentimes know about these other medicines that could be used.
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