How nearly dying helped me discover my own cure (and many more) | David Fajgenbaum
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Physician scientist David Fagenbaum was dying from a disease that didn't have a cure until he discovered a life-saving treatment in an unexpected place.
What life-threatening experience did David Fajgenbaum face?
Today, he's been in remission for over a decade. In this mind-blowing talk, David shares how this near-death experience led him to co-found EveryCure, a nonprofit that uses AI to accelerate the discovery of new uses in medications that are already approved by the American FDA. It offers hope for healing on an unprecedented scale.
How did David's near-death experience inspire his mission?
And stick around after the talk for a Q&A between David and Lateef Nasser, the co-host of Radiolab and a guest curator at TED 2025.
Hi, I'm David Fagenbaum, and this is me in 2010 when all of my organs were shutting down and I was dying for the first time. My doctors came in the room and told me, David, we've tried everything. There's nothing more we can do. But I was so sick, I didn't really know what my doctors meant until my family came in the room and started hugging me goodbye, and a priest read me my last rites. I was 25 years old, a former college quarterback and a medical student who had dedicated my life to becoming a doctor after my mom died from cancer. And yet here I was, literally dying from a disease that I'd never even heard about during medical school called Castleman disease, where your immune system attacks and shuts down your vital organs for an unknown cause.
There were no approved treatments and no cures. But in a last-ditch effort to save me, my doctors gave me a combination of seven chemotherapies that weren't meant for my disease.
How did David turn his hope into actionable steps for survival?
Amazingly, they worked, I survived, I returned to medical school, and I got what I think might be the worst before-and-after picture of all time. But then I relapsed again and again. Five times in three years, I almost died from my disease. I'll never forget during my third relapse, when I was laying in my hospital bed with my girlfriend Caitlin and my family around me. My gown was drenched in tears, not just because I was dying, but because of all the things that I would miss out on. The family that I'd never had with Caitlin, the patients that I'd never treat, the cures that I'd never discover in memory of my mom. See, until then, I'd been waiting and hoping that some researcher somewhere would discover a treatment that could save my life.
But in that moment, I realized that hope alone is not enough. If I wanted any chance of survival, I would need to turn my hope into action to try to find a treatment to save my life. There was just one really big problem. I didn't have 15 years and a billion dollars to develop a new drug from scratch.
What role does drug repurposing play in finding cures?
But the good news is that those seven chemotherapies that had saved my life, they weren't made for my disease.
What innovative methods is EveryCure using to find treatments?
So I thought to myself, maybe there's another drug made for another disease that could also be repurposed for me. This concept of repurposing isn't new. You've probably all heard of Viagra before, right? Well, you may know that Viagra was repurposed from heart disease to its well-known use. But did you know it's also now utilized for a rare pediatric lung disease? And thalidomide, which is known for causing horrible birth defects, is now utilized for leprosy and the cancer multiple myeloma. Now, repurposing works because though diseases like leprosy and myeloma may appear very different, they can actually share the same underlying problems or mechanisms in the body and can therefore be treated with the same drug.
And amazingly, doctors can prescribe any FDA-approved drug for any disease where they believe the benefit outweighs the risk through something called off-label prescribing. And off-label prescribing is actually very common. In fact, one in four prescriptions written every single day in the US is off-label. So I began to study my own blood in the lab to try to find a repurposed drug for me. I discovered that a communication line to my immune system was turned into overdrive and that a decades-old transplant drug might be able to turn it off.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:07–0:24
2
What life-threatening experience did David Fajgenbaum face?
0:24–0:46
3
How did David's near-death experience inspire his mission?
0:46–1:55
4
How did David turn his hope into actionable steps for survival?
1:55–3:00
5
What role does drug repurposing play in finding cures?
3:00–3:06
6
What innovative methods is EveryCure using to find treatments?
3:06–4:36
7
How can artificial intelligence accelerate drug discovery?
4:36–5:53
8
What success stories have emerged from EveryCure's efforts?
5:53–16:04
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from TED Talks Daily
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