Philly Nonprofit Gets $76M to Match Drugs With Rare Diseases

A Philadelphia nonprofit is about to supercharge the search for treatments that could help 300 million people worldwide living with rare diseases.

Every Cure, founded by University of Pennsylvania researcher David Fajgenbaum, just received $76 million from ARPA-H, the federal government's advanced health research agency. The funding will help expand an AI tool that does something remarkable: it matches existing, approved drugs with rare diseases that desperately need treatments.

Fajgenbaum knows this struggle personally. As a third-year medical student at Penn, he was diagnosed with Castleman disease, a rare lymph node disorder with almost no treatment options. Faced with his own mortality, he started researching existing drugs that might work for his condition.

That personal mission became Every Cure's big idea. Of the roughly 7,000 rare diseases affecting people today, about 95% have no approved treatments. Meanwhile, thousands of drugs already deemed safe by regulators sit on pharmacy shelves, their full potential unexplored.

The nonprofit's AI platform scans medical literature, clinical trial data, and drug databases to find promising matches. Instead of spending billions and decades developing new drugs from scratch, Every Cure identifies existing medications that might help patients right now.

The Ripple Effect

This approach could transform how we think about drug discovery. When researchers find a new use for an existing drug, patients can access treatments years faster than waiting for new medications to go through the entire approval process.

The $76 million investment also signals growing confidence in AI-powered medical research. ARPA-H, created to fund breakthrough health technologies, clearly sees potential in tools that can sift through massive amounts of data to spot connections human researchers might miss.

Every Cure operates as a nonprofit, which means any discoveries will be shared openly with the medical community. That collaborative approach could spark treatment breakthroughs for diseases that pharmaceutical companies often overlook because they affect too few patients to be profitable.

For the millions of families navigating rare disease diagnoses with few options, this funding represents something powerful: the possibility that an answer already exists, waiting to be discovered.