Happy New Year!
2025 was not exactly health care’s finest hour. In fact, a lot of damage has been done, with no scientific backing to support many of the changes. I’m needing to look at bright spots and hope for the coming year.
Something that could make a difference is Every Cure. This non-profit’s goal is to improve and save lives by repurposing existing drug.
Founded by Dr. David Fajgenbaum David was told there were no more options for his disease and waiting for a new treatment – requiring billions of research dollars and 10-15 years – was not a possibility. Repurposing an existing drug was his only hope. Repurposing existing drugs for new uses is possible, because many diseases share the same underlying problem or mechanism in the body and many drugs can have multiple mechanisms of action. David launched an initiative to find treatments to save his life and the lives of others with CD. He and his team discovered an overactive pathway in his blood and tested a 25-year-old drug called sirolimus that was approved as an immunosuppressant after kidney transplants but had never been used for CD, to block that pathway. As a result of this repurposed drug, David has been in remission for more than 11 years. During this time, Dr. Fajgenbaum and his teams at the University of Pennsylvania, Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, and Every Cure have advanced 14 repurposed drugs for multiple diseases, saving thousands of lives.
You can watch the TED Talk below to learn more about Faigenbaum.
“There are all these drugs available, sitting in your local pharmacy, but they aren’t being used to treat all the conditions they could.” But in the years since the book came out—and, more specifically, since the rise of powerful A.I. models—Fajgenbaum has started to find solutions for that problem. He co-founded a nonprofit called Every Cure, which trained an A.I. model on what he described as “the world’s knowledge of every disease, gene, protein, and molecule, as well as the interactions between them.” The algorithm began to propose previously unknown applications for known treatments.The New Yorker article, July 15, 2025, is an excellent summary-available in audio and print-and worth the read or listen.
Next year, (that’s 2026) Fajgenbaum plans to publicly release scores for the tens of millions of drug-disease pairs that Every Cure’s A.I. platform has examined. For virtually any disease, researchers, doctors, and patients will be able to visit a website and see much of what his team saw.
There are ways that you can support the work of Every Cure that doesn’t necessarily involve money. You can share your repurposing ideas and if you have expertise, sign up to volunteer.
Other organizations involved involved in drug repurposing include:
• Repurposing of Medicines 4 All: This is a European Platform for Medicine Repurposing
• Broad Institute Developing Diagnostics and Treatments Drug Repurposing Hub
• Life Arc: New toolkit launched to help repurposed medicines reach patients
• CURE ID: An internet-based repository that allows the global community to report novel uses of existing drugs for difficult-to-treat diseases through a website, a smartphone, or other mobile device.
Another interesting option is Patients Like Me, which has been around since 2010. By patients sharing their data, they have done research with existing drugs that have been repurposed. Click here for the research that has come from Patients Like Me.
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