u/PrincipleFew462

David Fajgenbaum, co-founder and president of Every Cure, physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

>“And then our medical team, which are MDs, PhDs and MD-PhDs, they actually look at the.99, this drug for that disease. Why is it that lidocaine might be a treatment for breast cancer? Lidocaine is the numbing medicine you get if you go to the dentist, for example.

>It's a very common numbing medicine. We have a program around injecting lidocaine around breast tumors before surgical excision. There was a large clinical trial done of 1600 patients that were randomized to have this numbing medicine injected around the tumor, and the other half didn't.

>The patients who were randomly assigned to have the injection around their tumor had a 29% reduction in mortality. This is startling because a 29% reduction in mortality is a huge mortality improvement. It's also startling because lidocaine is already used in nearly every surgical procedure.

>It's used at the site of the incision. So that way when you wake up from your surgery, you have less pain when you wake up. So it's already a substance that's being used during the surgery.

>What's being proposed here is to use that exact same substance, but just put it around the tumor 8 to 10 minutes before surgery and you have the potential to reduce mortality in a really significant way. This study was done. It was published in a great medical journal, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, and no one's doing it.

>The reason no one's injecting this is probably a few fold. One is that it's only one clinical trial, so maybe we need to do another trial, maybe we need to wait another five or seven years to learn more about it. Another part of it is that there is no company that makes lidocaine in a branded fashion.

>There's 10 plus different companies that make generic lidocaine, and they all make it for pennies and injection, and they all share fractions of this market, so there's no entity that's financially incentivized to do more studies with lidocaine, or to make sure that every patient who has breast cancer asks their doctor to have lidocaine injected around their tumor beforehand.”

From Freakonomics Radio: 664. Are Thousands of Medical Cures Hiding in Plain Sight?, Feb 20, 2026