After nearly dying from a mysterious disease during medical school, Dr. David Fajgenbaum dedicated his career to breaking down barriers in biomedical research. Fajgenbaum is now an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and cofounder of Every Cure. In this conversation, we discuss his personal diagnostic journey and the errors and delays he encountered along the way. We also explore why academic medicine needs to go beyond generating disparate pieces of scientific knowledge and instead turn that information into nodes on a network that spans specialty silos to speed the discovery of effective treatments.