Cure: Tell us about how you began Every Cure.
Grant Mitchell: It’s been a long journey. The inspiration for Every Cure came more than 10 years ago when our co-founder David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, was suffering from a rare and deadly disease called Castleman disease. I’m happy to say it’s now been 10 years that he's been in remission since finding a cure for himself. And he did it by repurposing a drug that already existed and finding out that it actually worked for his disease as well. That helped us understand there's a problem out there — the drugs we currently have in society are not fully utilized to treat every disease that they possibly can. We use artificial intelligence to find new uses for existing drugs to for diseases that don't have treatments yet.
Cure: Wow, that's incredible. How is he doing today?
Mitchell: He's completely healthy. He's our chair and chief scientific officer, and he's gone on to do amazing things. He’s a tenured professor running a center at the University of Pennsylvania to find more opportunities like this. We've been dreaming of creating this company ever since then.
Cure: How does your AI for Health solution work?
Mitchell: Our company is building an artificial intelligence platform based on compiling all the world's biomedical knowledge relevant for identifying drug repurposing opportunities. We put that into a biomedical knowledge graph and then mine for connections between drugs and diseases. Because there are 3,000 drugs and 20,000 diseases, that means there could be 60 million possibilities of different drug and disease combinations. We then find the drug-disease pairs that have the highest potential for patient impact. We pursue those and take them all the way through clinical trials to ensure that patients receive the treatments they need.
Cure: Can you give a real-world example to bring it to life?
Mitchell: A real-world example is the first actual run we did with the platform. We zoomed in on a disease that we were very familiar with — Castleman Disease, the one our co-founder suffered from. We found that the very top prediction was a drug called adalimumab. We had just put that into a patient weeks prior, validating our approach. That patient, who had been in hospice, is now doing well. It saved that person's life. We're excited to find more and more cures like that.
Cure: What do you think the impact of this technology could be?
Mitchell: We're not pursuing a specific disease the like a single disease organization.
We're looking across the whole spectrum of drugs and diseases to find not only the lowest-hanging fruit on one tree, but the lowest-hanging fruit in the entire forest. We start from the perspective of being agnostic to both drug and disease. We validate the findings in both the lab and clinical trials and try to update treatment guidelines so patients can benefit. We're solving the problem that the drugs we have today are not being fully utilized to treat every disease that they possibly can.
Cure: This is so exciting. Obviously, your founder was the inspiration behind Every Cure, but what keeps you all going every day?
Mitchell: What keeps us going every day are the patients. We get calls every single day from different organizations around the world where their disease is neglected because either the patient population is too small or there's just no significant research infrastructure around them. So we’re scaling the research we did with Castleman disease to all diseases. We're democratizing access to expert insights so that no patient has to hear, “I'm sorry. There's nothing left that we can do for you.”
Cure: If you won the Cure Xchange Challenge, what would that mean for your company?
Mitchell: One of the amazing things about the Cure innovation campus is that it's not just a building that holds people, it’s an ecosystem for life science organizations. It also has lab space and organizations that work across the value chain, bringing life science concepts to market. Being in the space will help us achieve our mission of developing tools for researchers and giving hope to patients.