I remember telling my roommate @grantwmitchell in our 3rd year of medical school, I think I’m going to die…
He thought I was joking at first. I would have too. After all, every med student thinks they have the horrible diseases we learn about and I had always been incredibly healthy — I had even won a bench pressing competition a couple months earlier.
But a few weeks later he was standing beside me in an ICU after a priest had read me my last rites, hugging me goodbye and not thinking he’d ever see me again.
Somehow I survived.
And when I woke up, we did what medical students do — we searched for answers. We expected to find experts, clinical trials, someone somewhere working on this disease. But we didn’t find much and just a sparse Castleman disease Wikipedia page. A disease so rare the internet barely acknowledged it. And the few things we did find basically said everyone dies within a few years.
We kept saying to each other, “They” must be working on this somewhere, diligently advancing research that will inevitably result in a cure.
Eventually we realized there was no “they.”
So we looked at each other and asked the question that changed both of our lives:
Could we be “they”?
So we started asking “How many more drugs are sitting at the pharmacy that could treat more patients?” “What if we became “they” across many diseases?” “And what if we could use AI to help us find the very best repurposing opportunities to treat horrible diseases?”
And then, with @traceysikora , we co-founded @EveryCure .
The idea was simple: there are medicines already sitting on pharmacy shelves that could save lives — we just don’t know which diseases and patient they can treat yet.
Every Cure became our way of turning my survival into a roadmap for saving many more — so no patient hears the words “we’ve tried everything, there’s nothing more we could do” when there’s a life saving therapy sitting on the pharmacy shelf. And for the first time ever, people around the world can say “they must be looking into this.”
