My doctors gave me a 1 in a million chance to find a cure to my disease.

To make things worse, I didn’t have a billion dollars and 10 years to develop a new drug from scratch.

My only hope was to find a drug that was already FDA-approved that I could repurpose for my disease.

I’m super excited that I’ll be speaking this week at BIO, the world’s largest convening of pharmaceutical and biotech companies focused on drug development.

I’ll have the opportunity on Wednesday at 12:15pm to share about the work we’re doing through Every Cure.

If you’ll be

Honored to be featured among these leaders in oncology on the The ASCO Post! CDCN Every Cure Penn #chasingmycure

The Mayo Clinic saved my life with a Castleman's diagnosis just in time, and this week, I had the chance to give back.

As I gave this talk, I looked at the audience and thought to myself, “One of you doctors was the person who looked at my lymph node and made the diagnosis.”

Can anyone explain why CART19 in SLE and now CD19/CD3 BiTE in RA seem to provide the perfect B-cell reset button, but antibody-mediated depletion doesn't? Are there B-cell locations where T-cells can kill but antibody-coating won't?

nature.com/articles/s4159…

What factors should clinicians consider when deciding to use a drug off-label?

Yesterday I sat down with master repurposing clinician Dr. Luke Chen to discuss this.

Here are several factors that come to mind:

1. Safety Profile: How safe is the drug? The patient’s overall

While battling for my life in the ICU, a seemingly minor symptom caught my attention amidst the life-threatening failure of my vital organs.

Small bumps, known as blood moles, emerged on my chest and shoulders during my relapses.

This observation became a critical piece of my

A painful rare disease where calcium builds up in the arteries could be treated with a drug that had been overlooked for years.

Etidronate, a drug that reduces calcium absorption, is used in various bone diseases. Given this rare disease (ACDC) has an excessive calcium issue, it

Out of the 22,000 human diseases, 19,000 have no approved treatments

When I was a medical student at Penn, I was hearing about all these breakthroughs and feeling so hopeful and optimistic that there were either cures for every disease out there or cures on their way.

But

A 40-year-old drug that everyone had forgotten about could actually be a potential treatment for diseases like Parkinson’s and maybe even some cancers.

Recent research from a team at NCATS determined that auranofin, a drug around for decades treating rheumatoid arthritis, is

When All Hope Seemed Lost, a Repurposed Drug Gave Kaila a Second Chance

Kaila’s parents reached out to us at the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network in September 2019.

At that time, Kaila was hospitalized in the ICU with all of her organs shutting down. Her doctors were

Loved being a part of this great event and having the opportunity to speak to the next generation of leading scientists! jccfund.org/blog/2024-annu…

#chasingmycure CDCN Every Cure

We are excited to bring you our newest patient documentary about Kaila, a rare disease patient whose life was saved thanks to a repurposed drug that had never been tried before.

Click the link below to watch the full episode!
youtube.com/watch?v=YXwIt5…

Debilitating symptoms experienced by individuals with Down syndrome may actually benefit from repurposed treatments!

Researchers at Children's Hospital of LA and Colorado have done amazing work to uncover that two existing drugs, IVIg and Tofacitinib, might be helpful for

People who have Alzheimer’s and seizures can experience rapid cognitive decline. A study in mice suggests treatment with the organ transplant drug rapamycin may preserve cognitive function, like memory and the ability to learn new things. Penn
bit.ly/44zB1cP #NIH

How do you keep going when you're on the brink of death?

One of the crucial lessons I learned while fighting for my life was taking things one day at a time, or in my case it ended up being one breath at a time because I was in so much pain

Whether you are fighting a rare

Huge news! WHIM Syndrome received its first ever approved therapy!

WHIM syndrome, a rare and devastating condition that makes individuals more susceptible to potentially life-threatening bacterial infections, which up until now had no treatment options available.

While this

Did you know that the price of a drug is determined by the disease it's developed for not the cost of the actual drug?

When tocilizumab was created for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), its price was set based on other RA drugs, not the actual cost of production. Once established in