The Cure Hiding in Plain Sight: How Every Cure Is Rewriting the Rules of Drug Discovery

David Fajgenbaum was running out of medicine before he was running out of will.

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In 2010, he was a third-year medical student when Castleman disease nearly killed him. He spent months in the hospital. He came terrifyingly close to death multiple times. And eventually he reached the point that haunts so many rare-disease patients and families: medicine had recognized the illness, but it had run out of clear answers.

That is where the story of Every Cure begins.

Not with a funding round. Not with a slick AI demo. Not with a generic promise to transform healthcare. It begins with a patient who became a doctor-scientist and learned, in the hardest possible way, that the healthcare system is not only bad at finding new cures. It is also remarkably bad at recognizing when a possible cure may already exist.

That is the central provocation of Every Cure, the nonprofit organization Fajgenbaum co-founded to identify new uses for existing medicines and move them toward patients who have run out of good options. Its premise is simple enough to sound obvious and radical enough to expose a major failure in modern medicine: some of the treatments people need most may already be sitting on pharmacy shelves, hidden in plain sight, unseen not because the biology is impossible, but because the system is not built to look for them.

Every Cure matters because it turns that insight into a mission. It is trying to industrialize drug repurposing, using large-scale data, AI, and translational follow-through to search systematically for therapies that the traditional drug pipeline has weak incentives to pursue. In an era obsessed with novelty, it is making a different argument. The future of healthcare discovery may depend not only on inventing new molecules, but on finding the neglected value buried inside old ones.

The illness that changed everything

Founding myths are often exaggerated. This one does not need embellishment.

According to Every Cure’s own history, Fajgenbaum nearly died five times from Castleman disease, a rare inflammatory disorder that can trigger overwhelming immune dysfunction and multi-organ failure. He was young, medically literate, and surrounded by experts, and still found himself in the same place so many patients with rare disease eventually reach: trapped between a diagnosed condition and a system with no reliable next move.

What saved him was not a newly invented wonder drug. It was sirolimus, an existing medicine originally approved to help prevent organ transplant rejection. Fajgenbaum and collaborators identified an overactive pathway in his disease and used sirolimus to target it. The drug worked. He went into remission, and has now remained in remission for years.

That would already be a remarkable medical story. But what followed is what makes Every Cure more than a personal miracle narrative.

Fajgenbaum appears to have drawn a bigger conclusion from his recovery. If one overlooked use of one existing drug could save one life, how many other patients were being failed not because medicine had no answer, but because nobody had searched broadly enough, or persistently enough, to find it?

That question has an almost unbearable weight if you let it sit for a moment. It implies that patients may be dying not only from diseases, but from a structural failure of search.

From one life saved to a repeatable system

Before Every Cure was formally launched, Fajgenbaum had already spent years helping build infrastructure around rare disease research and drug repurposing. Through the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network and related translational work, he and collaborators advanced multiple repurposed treatments across rare diseases and cancers. The problem was no longer whether repurposing could work. The problem was how to stop relying on serendipity.

Every Cure was founded in 2022 to answer that problem at scale.

The organization’s ambition is unusually large. Rather than focus on one disease at a time or one drug at a time, Every Cure wants to map therapeutic opportunity across the whole landscape of known diseases and approved medicines. On its site, it describes this as computational pharmacophenomics, using AI and machine learning to evaluate huge numbers of drug-disease possibilities and surface those with the greatest potential to help patients.

That is the essential leap. Drug repurposing has always been attractive, but it has too often functioned like folklore. A case report points to a signal. A clinician notices a pattern. A lucky off-label use works. Every Cure is trying to move that process from anecdote to strategy.

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According to the organization, its platform has scaled from evaluating 3,000 FDA-approved drugs across 12,000 known diseases, about 36 million evaluations, to a broader search across 22,000 diseases and the same 3,000 drugs, yielding 66 million drug-disease matches. The point is not that every match matters. The point is that the search itself is no longer narrow.

That changes the nature of the opportunity. Once a system can search at that scale, the question is no longer, “What if a drug happens to help?” It becomes, “How many potentially valuable therapies have we never seriously looked for?”

The market failure hiding inside medicine

Every Cure is compelling not just because of the science, but because it is aimed at a very specific economic blind spot.

Modern biomedicine is highly effective at mobilizing capital around therapies that are novel, patentable, and commercially legible. It is much less effective when the most promising path may involve a generic drug, a small patient population, and limited financial upside. That is where countless repurposing opportunities die. Not because they are biologically meaningless, but because they do not fit the incentive structure.

This matters especially in rare disease. Across thousands of rare and neglected conditions, patients often face some combination of diagnostic delay, fragmented evidence, tiny patient populations, weak research incentives, and no FDA-approved treatments. Every Cure points to this treatment gap directly, noting that only a minority of recognized diseases have approved therapies.

That is why the nonprofit model is so central to the story. It is not a branding choice. It is structural logic.

Every Cure says it chose the nonprofit path so it could pursue non-profitable treatments that would otherwise be left behind. That makes it a different kind of discovery institution. It is trying to stand in the exact place where scientific possibility and commercial neglect overlap. It can ask a question many conventional players cannot justify asking with enough persistence: what if the best answer is real, useful, and economically unexciting?

That gives the organization a rare kind of moral clarity. It exists not just to discover what is possible, but to pursue the possibilities that the market is most likely to ignore.

The wins that make this more than a theory

Good intentions are common in healthcare. Proof is rarer. What makes Every Cure worth serious attention is that it has already moved beyond mission language into real operating evidence.

First, it has built a genuine portfolio. Its site outlines active repurposing programs spanning ultra-rare disorders, fibrotic lung disease, vascular malignancy, autoimmune skin disease, breast cancer, major depressive disorder, histiocytosis, and other high-unmet-need conditions. That matters because it shows the organization is not simply living off one founder-origin story. It is trying to become a platform for repeated discovery.

Second, it has reported real patient impact. In 2023, Every Cure described a case in which AI-guided work identified adalimumab as a promising treatment for a patient with life-threatening idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease who had exhausted known options and was preparing for hospice. According to the organization, the patient improved rapidly and went into remission. Every Cure framed that as the first life saved with an AI-discovered repurposed medicine emerging from its work.

That is a major threshold moment. It means the story is no longer just about building a computational engine. It is about whether that engine can help produce consequences in the real world.

Third, the organization appears to be building real operational scale. Its annual-report language points to more than 9,000 repurposing opportunities reviewed, nine active drug-repurposing programs launched, and a growing pipeline of conditions under evaluation. That suggests Every Cure is trying to become not just a concept, but an institution.

Fourth, serious organizations are paying attention. Every Cure says it has received support from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, TED Audacious Project, Flagship Pioneering, Lyda Hill Philanthropies, Elevate Prize Foundation, Arnold Ventures, and ARPA-H. It has also attracted major media attention and public recognition, including TIME100 Health recognition for Fajgenbaum and coverage from major national outlets.

None of that proves inevitability. But it does show that informed observers believe this model is worth backing.

Why Every Cure feels bigger than one organization

The real power of Every Cure is that it points beyond itself.

It suggests that the future of healthcare discovery may not belong only to labs inventing brand-new molecules. It may also belong to institutions capable of searching neglected spaces with unusual discipline. Institutions willing to connect mechanistic biology, clinical need, old medicines, computational scale, and translational follow-through.

In that sense, Every Cure is about more than repurposing. It is about a different philosophy of discovery.

Discovery, in this framing, is not always invention. Sometimes it is recognition. Sometimes it is seeing a treatment possibility that was already there but had been scattered across papers, pathways, case reports, and clinical experience without ever being assembled into action. Sometimes the breakthrough is not a new molecule. It is a new way of searching.

That is why this story has so much narrative force. It begins with one doctor whose life was saved by an old drug used in a new way. It expands into the realization that the same kind of hidden opportunity may exist for countless others. Then it becomes a nonprofit built to pursue those hidden opportunities systematically, especially where profit logic offers little help.

That is a clean and unusually powerful arc. Few healthcare stories can move so naturally from personal survival to institutional design.

The question Every Cure leaves behind

Every Cure still has a long road ahead. It will need more validation, more partnerships, more clinical evidence, and more examples of repurposed therapies reaching patients at meaningful scale. It will have to prove that its platform can produce repeatable results, not just inspiring ones.

But even now, it has already done something important. It has made a hidden failure in medicine easier to see.

If existing drugs can save lives in diseases with no approved treatment, then the problem is not only scientific. It is organizational. It is economic. It is a problem of attention. Every Cure was built around the idea that attention itself can be redesigned, that neglected therapeutic possibilities can be made visible if someone is willing to search for them hard enough.

That is a serious idea. It is also a hopeful one.

Because it means the next breakthrough may not always require waiting for something entirely new to be invented. Sometimes it may require looking again, more systematically, at what medicine already has.

And for patients who do not have years to wait, that difference could mean everything.

Sources and further reading

• Every Cure homepage
• About Every Cure
• David Fajgenbaum at Every Cure
• Every Cure portfolio
• Every Cure news and media
• Every Cure first life saved with AI-guided repurposed medicine
• Every Cure Inc. on ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer

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