Using Existing Drugs in New Ways to Treat & Cure Diseases of Brain & Body | Dr. David Fajgenbaum
Huberman Lab
Scicomm Media
4.8 • 26.2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2025
⏱️ 119 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | My doctor explained to me that we were out of options. |
| 0:21.6 | He said, David, we've tried everything. You know, we tried these chemotherapies. We tried this one experimental drug. There's nothing more that we can do. There was a few minute period where my dad and my sisters and my girlfriend around me, and we were just bawling our eyes out. You know, this is the world's expert. And I kept probing him like, is there any cell type or signaling pathway or is there something we can target? Like anything, he said, David, there's nothing. |
| 0:25.7 | Is there anything in an early stage about, David, there is nothing? I heard what he was saying, |
| 0:31.0 | but then I thought to myself, you just gave me seven chemotherapies that were made for lymphoma |
| 0:36.3 | and my multimiloma. And they've saved my life now three times. It's not long term. Like I know I keep relapsing, but like if these seven chemotherapies are working, how do we know there's not an eighth chemotherapy or a ninth drug for something else? Like you can't tell. We haven't tried all 4,000 drugs. We've just tried the |
| 0:54.1 | drugs that maybe we've thought to try. And so I just locked in right then and I turned to my family and just sort of wiped away my tears and said, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life, however long that's going to be, it might be a couple days, maybe it'll be a couple months, but however long I've got to trying to find out, is there a drug out there that could help me in other patients with my disease that's made for another condition? |
| 1:13.0 | I just believe that the 4,000 drugs we have today should help all the patients who can benefit |
| 1:17.5 | from them. |
| 1:18.8 | Period. |
| 1:19.5 | Like, no one should suffer if there's a drug at your CVS that could help you. |
| 1:23.6 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. |
| 1:32.4 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. |
| 1:38.8 | My guest today is Dr. David Faganbaum. Dr. David Fagenbaum is a professor of translational medicine and human genetics |
| 1:45.5 | at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on finding novel cures to both rare and common |
| 1:51.3 | human diseases by using drugs and other treatments that already exist and that are approved |
| 1:56.2 | for use in humans for other purposes. As it turns out, most approved drugs impact at least 40 different |
| 2:02.0 | pathways and mechanisms across the human brain and body. But these drugs are generally approved |
| 2:06.8 | for use in just one or two of those pathways. David shares with us the many commonly unknown |
| 2:12.0 | yet powerful benefits of drugs that are already approved for things like heart health, combating |
| 2:17.1 | cancer, neurodegeneration, |
| 2:18.7 | and more. From his own near-death experience with Castleman's disease, David discovered that the |
| 2:23.7 | medical profession already has in hand excellent treatments and perhaps even cures for many of the |
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