A Dying Medical Student Saved Himself With Cheap Old Drugs
Eleven years after saving himself, his nonprofit uses AI to find other uses for cheap, old drugs, including a numbing drug tied to fewer recurrences.
The Joe Rogan Experience · #2553 - Andrew HubermanDoctors told David Fajgenbaum, then a medical student, that he was dying of Castleman's disease and that he had nothing left to try.
He started taking different combinations of drugs already approved for other uses. Eleven years later, he is alive and has children.
That experiment became a nonprofit called Every Cure. It looks for treatments for serious illness among cheap, old drugs that no company profits from because their patents have expired. The group says those combinations have helped children and adults.
The problem it tries to solve is money. Much drug research follows where profit is possible, and there is little profit in generics. Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman quotes Fajgenbaum as saying: "How about we just practice medicine?"
Every Cure searches medical records with artificial intelligence for cheap drugs that companies skip. In one search, the team found that breast cancer operations that used lidocaine, the common numbing drug, for local pain control showed a lower chance of the cancer coming back.
Why it works is still unclear. A possible explanation is that the numbing medicine stops nerves from growing back in a way that helps blood vessels form, which in turn helps tumors grow. That idea is only a guess, but the link itself looked strong.
Lidocaine will not cure breast cancer, and no company will get rich from it. In good hospitals it is now standard to use it during breast cancer surgery. The change came from a drug doctors already had in wide use.
Questions people ask
What is Castleman's disease?
Castleman's disease is a rare disorder in which the immune system overreacts and lymph nodes swell, and the most severe form can cause organ failure. Fajgenbaum had the idiopathic multicentric form, which had no reliable treatment when he was in medical school.
How does Every Cure work?
Every Cure is the nonprofit Fajgenbaum co-founded to find new uses for drugs that are already approved and often generic. It mines medical records and biomedical data with AI, then funds small trials to test promising matches for serious diseases without good treatments.
What is lidocaine and why does its low price matter?
Lidocaine is a widely used local anesthetic that dentists and surgeons inject to numb tissue. It is cheap, generic, and long considered safe, which is why researchers think it could be adopted quickly if larger trials confirm the breast cancer finding.