David Fajgenbaum: A cancer patient’s life was saved by a repurposed drug that was hiding in the medical literature for 3 years!

David Fajgenbaum, Physician-Scientist at University of Pennsylvania and Co-Founder at Every Cure, made the following post on Twitter:

“A cancer patient’s life was saved by a repurposed drug that was hiding in the medical literature for 3 years!

In 2016, Michael came to our center at Penn having been told he had three months to live.

We ended up leveraging a tool that we’d built to look back at previous studies and found a paper published in 2013 that suggested a drug could be useful for his cancer, but it had never been used before.

When we tested his tumor it looked promising that the drug could work and began him on this treatment.

Michael has been cancer-free for 7 years!

He became the first patient that we were aware of at the time to be treated with this drug for angiosarcoma. It’s now been used so many times in other patients and been so effective, that it is considered standard of care, and it’s recommended by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

This case study is why Every Cure is so passionate about unlocking the full potential of existing drugs. We want no patient to suffer when there are life-saving drugs on the pharmacy shelf.

How can we do a better job as a medical community of uncovering lifesaving treatments?”

Source: David Fajgenbaum/Twitter