RDAUTBMag2026

Joseph Coates (left) owes his life to the AI model created by Dr. David Fajgenbaum (right) and his team. 60 may 2026 How AI IS SAVING LIVES Artificial intelligence can find new uses for existing drugs, helping to treat rare diseases, including the one that almost killed Joseph Coates BY Kate Morgan from the new york times A LITTLE OVER TWO years ago, Joseph Coates was told there was only one thing left to decide. Did he want to die at home, or in the hospital? Coates, then 37 and living in Renton, Washington, was barely conscious. For months, he’d been battling a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet, an enlarged heart and failing kidneys. Every few days, doctors needed to drain liters of fluid from his abdo- men. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant—one of the only treatments that could have put him into remission. “I gave up,” Coates says. “I just thought the end was inevitable.” But his girlfriend, Tara Theobald, wasn’t ready to quit. She sent an email begging for help to David Fajgenbaum, MD, an immunology researcher in Phil- adelphia whom the couple had met a year earlier at a rare-disease summit. By the next morning, Dr. Fajgenbaum suggested an unconventional combina- tion of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids previously untested as a treatment for Coates’s disorder. Within a week, Coates was respond- ing to the treatment. In four months, he was healthy enough for a stem cell transplant. Today, he’s in remission. The lifesaving drug regimen wasn’t thought up by the doctor, or any person. It had been spit out by an artificial intelligence model. readersdigest.com.au 61 photography by Hannah Yoon/The New York Times