Using Existing Drugs in New Ways to Treat & Cure Diseases of Brain & Body | Dr. David Fajgenbaum

What It Covers

Dr. David Fajgenbaum explains how existing FDA-approved drugs can treat diseases beyond their original purpose, sharing his personal survival story using repurposed medications for Castleman disease and founding Every Cure to systematically match 4,000 approved drugs with 18,000 human diseases.

Key Questions Answered

• •Drug Repurposing Reality: Most approved drugs interact with 20-30 different proteins in the body but only get studied and approved for one or two conditions. Eighty percent of FDA-approved drugs are already generic with no financial incentive for companies to discover new uses, leaving potential treatments undiscovered despite existing at local pharmacies.
• •Lidocaine Cancer Application: A 1,600-patient trial in India showed women receiving lidocaine injection around breast tumors 8-10 minutes before surgery experienced 29% reduction in mortality at five years compared to controls. Despite publication in Journal of Clinical Oncology and minimal cost or risk, adoption remains minimal due to lack of systematic implementation mechanisms.
• •Aspirin Beyond Pain Relief: Aspirin reduces recurrence risk of colon cancer, particularly in patients with mTOR pathway mutations, yet remains underutilized because it lacks pharmaceutical company backing as a generic drug. This exemplifies how effective treatments fail to reach patients when profit incentives disappear after patent expiration.
• •Patient Advocacy Framework: Connect with disease-specific advocacy organizations first, identify world experts in your condition, and persistently ask about alternative treatments used elsewhere globally. Information asymmetry means doctors may not know about effective off-label uses, requiring patients to actively research and advocate for themselves beyond standard protocols.
• •Colchicine Heart Protection: Originally used for gout for 3,000 years, colchicine substantially reduces heart attack risk in patients with prior heart attacks and diabetes. Researchers changed the dosage slightly to create new intellectual property, enabling funding for large prevention trials that proved efficacy, demonstrating how system manipulation enables drug repurposing.