The Vision of Hope Award is presented to a person or organization through public or private actions has resulted in the advancement of care, treatment or awareness for sarcoma patients. The honoree impacts the lives of sarcoma patients and survivors providing them hope for a better future and whose achievements provide increased hope for better patient outcomes.
David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc
Associate Professor of Medicine, Translational Medicine & Human Genetics
Associate Director, Patient Impact, Orphan Disease Center, University of Pennsylvania
Co-Founder, Every Cure
David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, is a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the youngest professors to receive tenure in the history of Penn Medicine, the co-Founder & President of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network (CDCN), co-Founder and 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 a deadly disease for which he discovered a repurposed treatment that is saving his life.
Through his work at Penn and the CDCN, he has identified and advanced repurposed treatments for 16 additional diseases. Due to his work in, and his own experience with, repurposed treatments, Dr. Fajgenbaum was able to help his uncle Michael when he was diagnosed with metastatic angiosarcoma. In 2016, Dr. Fajgenbaum went into action to try to find a potential treatment that could be repurposed. He uncovered a study from 2013 suggesting that angiosarcoma may be susceptible to immunotherapy and tested his uncle’s tumor for a particular marker. When the test came back positive, his uncle pioneered the use of pembrolizumab, which put him into remission and has become an established treatment for angiosarcoma. Because of these experiences, Dr. Fajgenbaum co-founded Every Cure to unlock the full potential of FDA-approved medicines to treat every disease possible with repurposed drugs.
One of the youngest awardees of multiple top NIH and FDA grants, Dr. Fajgenbaum has published 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, GMA, USA TODAY, Forbes 30 Under 30, 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. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA. 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.