Podcast: medical student puts his fatal condition (castleman's disease) into remission with Rapamycin

#1

The Medical Matchmaking Machine

As he finished his medical school exam, David Fajgenbaum felt off. He walked down to the ER and checked himself in. Soon he was in the ICU with multiple organ failure. The only drug for his condition didn’t work. He had months to live, if that. If he was going to survive, he was going to have to find his own cure. Miraculously, he pulled it off in the nick of time. From that ordeal, he realized that our system of discovering and approving drugs is far from perfect, and that he might be able to use AI to find dozens, hundreds, even thousands of cures, hidden in plain sight, for as-yet untreatable diseases.

EPISODE CITATIONS:
Books -
Blair Bigham, Death Interrupted: How Modern Medicine is Complicating the Way We Die

Radiolab | Lateral Cuts:
Check out Death Interrupted (Death Interrupted), a conversation with Blair Bigham about a worldview shifting change of heart.

The Dirty Drug and the Ice Cream Tub (The Dirty Drug and the Ice Cream Tub) to hear the crazy story about how Rapamycin was discovered.

6 Likes
#2

Awesome podcast. Fun to listen to

#3

https://everycure.org/

https://everycure.org/roadmap-project/

#4

Inspiring and one of the best posts I’ve seen here in quite a bit.

The drug repurposing with ML/AI is interesting, and that they’re going to release it public for everyone to use:

What is Matrix?

MATRIX is Every Cure’s main pipeline for generating high-accuracy predictions of drug-disease pairs using an “all vs all” approach. The pipeline:

Ingests and integrates data from multiple sources
Builds a knowledge graph
Creates embeddings and trains models
Makes predictions on potential drug-disease treatments
Evaluates performance of the repurposing model

The output of our pipeline is a so-called matrix of approx 60 million drug-disease pairs with corresponding treat scores which are then examined by our team of physicians.

https://docs.dev.everycure.org/