Associate Professor of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania
David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the youngest faculty members to receive tenure in the history of Penn Medicine. He is also the Founding Director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory, co-Founder & President of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, co-Founder & President of Every Cure, and the national bestselling author of ‘Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action.’
Dr. Fajgenbaum is also a patient battling idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease, which he discovered a repurposed treatment for that is saving his life and others. He has also advanced 13 other repurposed treatments for diseases they weren’t initially intended for. He recently co-founded Every Cure to unlock the full potential of FDA-approved medicines to treat every disease they possibly can and he is pioneering a new field called computational pharmacophenomics that leverages AI to unlock the most promising drug repurposing opportunities. Dr. Fajgenbaum recently gave a speech at a White House event where the federal government announced they were directing $48M in funding to accelerate this work. As a leading voice for precision medicine and rare disease, Dr. Fajgenbaum also serves on the Board of Directors for the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, which was created by Congress to support the mission of the FDA.
One of the youngest ever awardees of multiple top NIH and FDA grants, Dr. Fajgenbaum has published nearly 100 scientific papers in high-impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation, including a paper selected as one of the top innovations in science and medicine of 2020. He has been profiled by The New York Times, TODAY Show, Good Morning America, USA TODAY, Forbes 30 Under 30, and others and received numerous awards, including the 2016 Atlas Award along with then VP Joe Biden, the 2022 NDRI Service to Science Award along with Nobel Laureates Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, and the 2023 Philadelphia Citizen of the Year Award. Dr. Fajgenbaum holds a BS from Georgetown University, MSc from the University of Oxford, MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and MBA from The Wharton School.