The challenge here with COVID is that there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all drug.

It's going to be a drug for a very specific population in a very specific time.

So many of us, when we think about a virus, we think about the virus, and we don't think

as much about the immune response to the virus, but that part of it is just so so critical.

You're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health, and social

impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

I'm your host, Dr. Saline Gounder.

David Faganbaum's life changed when his mom got sick. His mother was diagnosed with brain cancer

when he was in college, and that set him on a path into medicine. Watching her battle

both inspired me to want to help patients like her and watching her doctors inspired me to want

to want to be more like them. I wanted to dedicate my life towards trying to find solutions for

patients like my mom. David's mom passed away not long after her diagnosis.

That experience for me just put it very clearly in front of me that you can do all the right things,

you can go to all the right doctors and take all the right medications, and things still don't

always work out the way that you would hope that they would. But that experience only motivated David

more. He graduated college and went to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.

He decided to become an oncologist.

And so if you fast forward a few years to my third year of med school, I was on track and really

hopeful about being able to help patients like my mom, when out of nowhere I became the patient

myself. That's when his life changed again. When I was hospitalized, I was even in the intensive

care unit spent almost six months hospitalized with liver, kidney, bone marrow dysfunction.

I actually even had my last rights read to me. It took 11 weeks before the doctors could tell David

...