David Fajgenbaum was a third-year medical student when he was diagnosed with the rare Castleman disorder, which causes the immune system to attack vital organs. He nearly died five times before he discovered that sirolimus, a drug used to prevent transplant patients from rejecting a new kidney, might keep his disease in check. 

He hadn’t responded to the only drug in development for Castleman Disease. “I knew I didn’t have a billion dollars and ten years to create a new drug from scratch,” he said. “If I wanted to survive, I would need to find an existing drug that I could repurpose for my disease.”

Sirolimus worked. He has been in remission for 10 years, and takes the drug every day. And he has spent the decade helping to match patients with rare diseases with drugs that are already in pharmacies for other conditions, leveraging existing knowledge. Over the past decade, he and his colleagues have found 17 drugs that could be repurposed, mainly for treating cancers and inflammatory diseases.

In 2022, he helped found a nonprofit called Every Cure, which aims to help the 300 million people globally who are battling diseases with no approved treatments by unlocking the full potential of every existing drug to treat every disease it possibly can.

With funding from the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency that could surpass $48 million, Every Cure will build a drug-repurposing database and algorithms, ML/AI-enabled Therapeutic Repurposing In eXtended uses (MATRIX), that patients, doctors and researchers can use to find drugs for untreated diseases.