David Fajgenbaum

David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Founding Director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory (CSTL), Associate Director of Patient Impact for the Penn Orphan Disease Center, and co-Founder/President of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network (CDCN). He is also the national bestselling author of 'Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope Into Action' and a patient battling idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD). He is in his longest remission ever thanks to a precision treatment that he identified, which had never been used before for iMCD. An authority on cytokine storms and their treatment, Fajgenbaum launched the CORONA project in March 2020 to identify and track treatments for COVID-19. Today, CORONA is the world’s largest database of COVID-19 treatments, including 400+ medications that have been administered to 280,000+ patients, and a go-to resource for FDA, Google Health, and others. 

One of the youngest individuals ever appointed to the faculty at Penn Medicine and in the top 1 percent youngest awardees of an NIH R01 grant, Dr. Fajgenbaum leads over 20 translational research studies, including the CORONA project and a clinical trial of the drug that is saving his life. He has published scientific papers in high-impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Blood. To advance drug repurposing, he is co-directing an FDA/NIH/C-Path public-private partnership called the CURE Drug Repurposing Collaboratory and leading an effort for rare disease repurposing in collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.  Dr. Fajgenbaum has been profiled in a cover story by The New York Times as well as by Good Morning America, CNN, Forbes 30 Under 30, and the Today Show. Dr. Fajgenbaum earned a BS from Georgetown University, MSc from the University of Oxford, MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and MBA from The Wharton School.