When fighting a war, information really matters. You need to know what weapons have been tried and which ones have been most (and least) effective. This information helps soldiers to adjust their strategy. The same holds true when fighting a global war against a disease like COVID19 (or Castleman disease or any disease!). We need to know what drugs have been tried and which ones have worked, so doctors can adjust their treatment strategies. Unfortunately, there isn’t a central database to track drugs used for diseases. Instead, thousands of individual case reports and studies are published, each describing a few treatments in a few patients. Some of these drugs originally developed for other conditions that are being repurposed for use in this new condition may be the answer we’re all looking for, but the data aren’t centralized or searchable.
Following the path we blazed in fighting Castleman disease, we decided to assemble a team to read every published COVID19 paper and extract data on every treatment that has been given to a COVID19 patient. We set the ambitious goal for our 10 member team to read all 1,000 published papers in 10 days. The number of COVID19 papers soon exploded to over 2,000, but thankfully 20 more volunteers joined our team! In 12 days, we read 2,706 COVID19 articles and extracted data on 115 drugs used in 9,152 patients from 155 papers (and a MD/med student audited every data point).
Now, any physician or researcher in the world can access this open-source database here.
And Sheila Pierson, an incredible data scientist in my lab, is leading the effort to analyze these data to gain insights on which drugs seem to have the clearest benefit for patients. Check back here for updates.
Check out the below video about this effort or go to: https://youtu.be/0HFHfTd9-Y8
David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, is a groundbreaking physician-scientist, disease hunter, speaker, and bestselling author of the acclaimed memoir, Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action. Best known as the ‘doctor who cured himself’ (Doctor Cure Thyself, NY Times), Fajgenbaum went from being a beast-like college Quarterback to receiving his last rites while in medical school and nearly dying four more times battling Castleman disease. To try to save his own life, he spearheaded an innovative approach to research and discovered a possible treatment that has put him into an extended remission. Now, he is spreading this approach to other diseases (His method could save millions, CNN) and sharing lessons he learned about living from nearly dying through Chasing My Cure, which has been translated into four languages and named one of the “Best Non-Fiction Books of 2019” by Next Big Ideas Club.