David Fajgenbaum

David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, is Co-Founder and President of Every Cure and a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania where he is one of the youngest faculty members to receive tenure at Penn Medicine. He’s also a patient battling a deadly disease for which he discovered a lifesaving treatment by repurposing an existing drug, an experience he recounted in his national bestselling memoir, ‘Chasing My Cure’. Determined to unlock more hidden cures in FDA-approved medications, David has advanced 13 more repurposed treatments for diseases they weren’t originally intended to treat. He recently co-founded Every Cure to accelerate the search for repurposed treatments and is pioneering a new field called “computational pharmacophenomics,” which uses AI to systematically match all drugs with additional diseases they may treat. The U.S. government and the TED Audacious Project have announced more than $100 million in funding to power this transformative vision. One of the youngest ever awardees of multiple top NIH and FDA grants, David has published over 100 scientific papers in leading journals, such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation, which included a paper selected as one of the top innovations in science and medicine of 2020. He has been profiled by The New York Times, TODAY, GMA, USA TODAY, and Forbes 30Under30 and awarded the 2016 Atlas Award alongside then VP Joe Biden, 2022 NDRI Service to Science Award alongside Nobel Laureates Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, 2023 Philadelphia Citizen of the Year Award, and 2024 WebMD Health Hero Award. Dr. Fajgenbaum earned a BS from Georgetown University, MSc from the University of Oxford, MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and MBA from The Wharton School. Beyond his coursework, David was a Division I college quarterback and founded and led a national grief support network during college and graduate school.

Saving lives with hidden cures

Saving lives by repurposing existing medicines