A Philly biotech got $60M from a TED initiative for AI in medicine
Every Cure will use the money to help repurpose existing therapies into treatments for different diseases, a strategy co-founder David Fajgenbaum says saved his own life.
A nonprofit biotechnology company based in Philadelphia has received $60 million from a TED initiative that funds “big ideas.”
The company, Every Cure, is using the money to further its mission of employing AI to help match existing treatments to new diseases.
The company’s focus stems from the personal experience of one of its founders, David Fajgenbaum, an immunologist and associate professor at University of Pennsylvania, who credits a repurposed drug with saving his life.
In his third year of medical school at Penn, Fajgenbaum developed Castleman disease, a fatal disorder that causes flu-like symptoms and affects roughly 5,000 people in the U.S. With few therapeutic options available, Fajgenbaum decided to look for his own solutions.
He took samples of his own blood and identified a protein present in high levels. He recalled a drug he learned about in medical school that suppresses the protein, but was approved for patients after kidney transplant surgery to prevent their body from rejecting the new organ. Fajgenbaum decided to take it anyway, and believes the repurposed transplant medication saved his life.
The goal of the new funding stream, from TED’s Audacious Project, is to offer the same opportunity to other patients diagnosed with rare diseases, Fajgenbaum said in a statement. “This is such a major step in our journey to unlock the lifesaving potential of existing drugs,” he noted. “I’m alive because of a repurposed drug and we’ve been able to save the lives of other patients with repurposed drugs over the last 10 years. This funding will help us to save many more lives all around the world.”
According to Every Cure, 1 in 10 people will develop a disease with no approved treatment.
Earlier this year, Every Cure received $48 million from ARPA-H, a new federal agency dedicated to expediting innovative solutions to disease. Its AI program scans databases of information about diseases and available drugs to identify new matches — existing drugs that could find another use as new treatments for diseases they weren’t designed for.
According to the company, the new stream of funding from TED’s Audacious Project will help enable it to evaluate the most promising matches, and work with organizations to ensure that the repurposed medications reach patients.