Are Thousands of Medical Cures Hiding in Plain Sight?

The Potential of Drug Repurposing

• 💡 Many of the 18,000 known human diseases lack an FDA-approved treatment, highlighting a significant gap in medical care.
• 🔬 Drug repurposing involves finding new uses for existing, already approved drugs, offering a faster and cheaper path to new treatments.
• 💊 An example is Nitroxoline, a European UTI drug, successfully used to treat the brain-eating amoeba Balamuthia, which previously had a 90% fatality rate.

A Personal Journey to Every Cure

• 🧠 David Fagenbomb, a physician-scientist, founded Every Cure after his own battle with Castleman disease, a rare and deadly immune disorder.
• 🧪 Through personal research, he discovered that Sirolimus (Rapamycin), an organ transplant drug, could treat his condition by inhibiting the overactive mTor pathway.
• 🚀 This experience inspired him to dedicate his life to systematically identifying other existing drugs that could save lives by being repurposed.

AI-Driven Discovery and Economic Barriers

• 📊 Every Cure utilizes AI and biomedical knowledge graphs to analyze 4,000 drugs against 18,000 diseases, scoring potential drug-disease matches.
• ⚠️ A significant discovery, such as Lidocaine reducing breast cancer mortality by 29% when injected around tumors, often goes unadopted due to a lack of financial incentive.
• 💰 The economic system is broken for generic drugs; while repurposing costs 1% of new drug development, there's "zero financial upside" for companies to pursue new uses for off-patent drugs.

Innovative Solutions for Incentivization

• 🤝 The Market Shaping Accelerator (MSA) proposes "pull funding" where government entities like Medicare or Medicaid would offer rewards for successful repurposing, based on the drug's impact.
• 🌐 The FDA's Cure ID is a registry and mobile application allowing clinicians, patients, and caregivers to share experiences with repurposed drugs, generating hypotheses for further study.
• 🚧 Despite positive feedback, Cure ID faces challenges in adoption because clinicians lack direct career incentives to contribute data.

Overcoming Neglect and Driving Impact

• 📉 Drug repurposing research is often seen as "not sexy enough" and receives a fraction of 1% of medical research dollars, despite its high potential return on investment.
• ✨ Every Cure has raised over $100 million to accelerate repurposing efforts, aiming to treat 15 to 25 debilitating conditions within the next five years.
• 🎯 Fagenbomb emphasizes that the primary concern is not meeting expectations but rather finding cures in time for suffering patients who could benefit from existing medicines.