Inspired by my journey discovering a drug that could be repurposed to save my life, I co-founded Every Cure in September 2022 to unlock the full potential of existing medicines to treat every disease and every patient possible. I had the opportunity to announce Every Cure’s launch during the Opening Session of the Clinton Global Initiative.
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Our Why. As I shared in Chasing My Cure, I nearly died five times from Castleman disease (CD) before discovering that the inexpensive transplant drug sirolimus was also effective for CD. This discovery has saved countless patients’ lives, including my own and inspired the creation of Every Cure. Our team has identified 9 other CD treatments as well as treatments for cancer and COVID-19, including guiding the selection of drugs for the groundbreaking ACTIV-6 clinical trial. Incredibly, dexamethasone and tocilizumab, which were rapidly repurposed as treatments for COVID-19, have likely saved the most lives during this pandemic.
Unfortunately, insufficient incentives, siloed data, misaligned stakeholders, and other market failures have impeded the identification of all potential uses for all drugs, especially low-cost, generic drugs. The incomplete utilization of existing drugs and focus on new, expensive drugs has a disproportionately negative impact on individuals in areas with reduced access to medicines.
Society needs a systematic effort to identify the most promising drug repurposing opportunities and bring them to patients, which would save precious lives and enormous costs.
Our Approach. We are dedicated to unlocking all diseases that all existing drugs can treat by developing a comprehensive, open-source database of drug repurposing opportunities, and launching clinical trials of the most promising treatments. Specifically, we obtain, integrate, and analyze multiple data sources (e.g., PubMed, public data repositories, clinicaltrials.gov, medical record data, pathway and drug databases), utilize natural language processing, and apply a machine learning algorithm modeled after our COVID-19 algorithm to identify the most promising drug repurposing opportunities. We integrate insights from disease experts and pharmaceutical companies to further refine its assessment of the most promising repurposing opportunities and partner with disease research organizations to perform clinical trials of these opportunities. This approach has previously identified drug repurposing opportunities for Castleman disease, COVID-19, and angiosarcoma, and an initial pilot uncovered 106 promising drug repurposing opportunities in a first-set of 147 diseases. Now, we’re scaling this work to all known diseases and drugs.
This initiative overcomes systemic challenges that have impeded the identification of all potential uses for all drugs by aggregating data and aligning stakeholders and financial incentives. The non-profit organizational structure enables us to pursue generic drugs in promising new indications with no commercial incentive. Our team contributes expertise in drug discovery and repurposing, patient-driven research, informatic analyses, and clinical trial execution, powered by collaborative partnerships with leading philanthropic organizations, medical informatics firms, tech companies, and biopharmaceutical companies.
Learn more about how you can help pursue this mission.