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Home » How Nearly Dying Helped Me Discover My Own Cure (and Many More): David Fajgenbaum (Transcript)

How Nearly Dying Helped Me Discover My Own Cure (and Many More): David Fajgenbaum (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of physician-scientist David Fajgenbaum’s talk titled “How Nearly Dying Helped Me Discover My Own Cure (and Many More)”, recorded at TED2025 on April 10, 2025.

Listen to the audio version here:

From Death’s Door to Medical Discovery

DAVID FAJGENBAUM: Hi, I’m David Fajgenbaum 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 desperate effort to save me, my doctors gave me a combination of seven chemotherapies that weren’t meant for my disease. 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 have with Caitlin, the patients that I’d never treat, the cures that I’d never discover in memory of my mom.

Turning Hope Into Action

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. The good news is, is that those seven chemotherapies that had saved my life, they weren’t made for my disease. So I thought to myself, maybe there’s another drug made for another disease that could also be repurposed for me.

The Power of Drug Repurposing

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 as 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 U.S. is off-label.

My Personal Breakthrough

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 in my immune system was turned into overdrive and that a decades-old transplant drug might be able to turn it off. It had never been used before for my disease, but I was out of options. So I began to test it on myself.

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In the three years before I started sirolimus, I nearly died five times. But since starting it, I’ve been in remission for over 11 years. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

During this remission, I married Caitlin, who’s here with us today. We had two amazing children. I wrote a book about my journey, “Chasing My Cure,” which is being turned into a film. And I joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania to continue to chase cures for rare inflammatory diseases and cancers.

And then in 2022, I co-founded Every Cure, a nonprofit organization that’s on a mission to unlock the full potential of each and every drug to treat each and every disease that it possibly can. Over these years, we’ve advanced 14 repurposed treatments for multiple diseases, saving thousands of lives, like Kyla, who began her freshman year of nursing school after we repurposed a bone marrow cancer drug to save her life, which is now being studied in clinical trials.

And Michael, who walked his son down the aisle on his wedding day after we repurposed a melanoma drug to treat his rare cancer, which is now being used all over the world for that rare cancer.

With every one of these discoveries, all I can think about is how many more life-saving drugs are sitting at our local pharmacies that could be life-saving for patients with diseases today. Because, see, us humans, we’ve developed 4,000 drugs for about 4,000 diseases. But there are over 14,000 diseases that don’t have a single approved therapy. That means that 1 in 10 of us and our kids will develop a rare disease without any approved treatments. And many more of us will develop diseases with limited treatment options.

We know that many of these FDA-approved drugs could treat many more of these diseases, and for less than 1% of the cost of new drug development, and way faster. So why aren’t we repurposing drugs?