When COVID-19 emerged, Fajgenbaum realized that he was perfectly positioned to look for repurposed drugs to fight it. On March 13, 2020, the day when much of the country began to shut down,"I found myself that night sitting next to my wife, hoping and praying that some researchers somewhere would follow the blueprint that we went through to identify this drug that saved my life," he said.
"I turned to my team and said, 'This is a disease that has many similarities to Castleman disease. You've experienced doing systematic drug repurposing, and frankly I'm alive today because of it. Let's apply this approach to COVID,'"he said. "Initially we thought there might be maybe a couple of dozen drugs that would be trialed. It's incredible -- there have now been over 400 different drugs, given to patients with COVID-19," he said, noting that the number of patients involved is approximately 270,000.
"But at the end of the day, really the only way to know if one of these drugs that looks promising in the lab actually works in humans, is to give it to humans and to see how well those patients do," he said.Since people can get better without medication , it's important to conduct randomized, controlled trials, where patients are randomly selected to get the active drug or a placebo; otherwise it's hard to know if patients would have gotten better on their own anyway.
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