Dr. David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, is the co-founder and President of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network (CDCN), co-founder and President of Every Cure, Founding Director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory (CSTL), and Associate Professor of Medicine in Translational Medicine & Human Genetics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he is one of the youngest faculty members ever to receive tenure. Dr. Fajgenbaum is also the national bestselling author of Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action and a patient battling idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD). After becoming ill during his third year of medical school in 2010 and nearly dying five times, he discovered a repurposed treatment that saved his own life and others. His book and story is being adapted into a film by Forrest Gump producer Wendy Finerman.
In 2012, Dr. Fajgenbaum co-founded the CDCN, through which he has spearheaded the “Collaborative Network Approach,” which has been scaled to over 100 rare disease organizations through the Rare As One Network. Over these years, Dr. Fajgenbaum has transformed the treatment and survival of patients with Castleman disease and other diseases, advancing a total of 14 repurposed treatments for cancers and rare diseases.
He co-founded Every Cure in 2022 to unlock more hidden cures from existing medicines and is pioneering a novel approach called “computational pharmacophenomics” that utilizes AI to predict the most promising drug repurposing opportunities and validates them in clinical trials. Check out Dr. Fajgenbaum’s 2025 TED Talk.