He Cured His Own Disease; Reader’s Digest, May 2020

With doctors and researchers around the world searching for effective treatments for COVID-19, many drugs approved to treat other diseases are being used in hopes that they’ll be effective against the virus, a use that’s known as “off-label.” A volunteer army that Dr. David Fajgenbaum assembled has catalogued every use documented in medical literature so…

Congress should encourage companies to repurpose existing drugs for rare diseases, potentially doubling the number of treatment options for patients. Lately, there has been a national uproar over the rising cost of medicine in the U.S. While this is an important public debate, it largely overlooks the critical importance of innovation, which is desperately needed…

We Announced the $48.3M Federal Partnership at the White House! It was incredibly special for me to speak at the White House on Wednesday about our funding from the federal government and what it will mean for patients like me. While on stage, I couldn’t help but think back to 14 years ago when I…

I’m thrilled to share that my paper on Cytokine Storms with Carl June, MD, was published today in the New England Journal of Medicine! A “cytokine storm” is an immune response that spirals out of control and occurs with Castleman disease, CART, severe COVID19, and other conditions. We developed the first unifying definition of a…

Wow, my head is spinning from these recent clinical trial results. Within minutes of one another, two conflicting studies were released. The first I’ll highlight is of tocilizumab (the drug that my friend and colleague Kazu Yoshizaki developed to treat Castleman disease and tested on himself to prove that it was safe before giving it…

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