Where insight meets impact: ZS’s partnership with Every Cure

At ZS, we bring our expertise to organizations across industries, from global leaders in healthcare, technology, and travel and hospitality to nonprofit organizations, all with one goal in mind: improving life and how we live it. That goal takes many forms, including our work with Every Cure, a nonprofit using AI to uncover new therapeutic uses for existing medicines.

These potential drug-disease matches can open new possibilities for communities facing significant unmet needs, but identifying a promising match is only the beginning. The greater challenge is translating scientific potential into real-world impact by creating a practical path to patient access.

Where passion meets purpose

Before joining ZS, Jason Yaffe worked in clinical research oncology, including rare pediatric cancers. Wanting to understand and influence the business side of biopharma, he earned his MBA and moved into consulting.

Early in his ZS career, Jason spent about four years supporting a treatment for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). At the time, SMA was a rare pediatric condition with no available treatment and a high mortality rate among children. Jason visited centers of excellence for SMA and muscular dystrophies, hearing directly from physicians, staff and nurse coordinators about the gap in care. He also engaged with patients and learned how rare diseases can affect not only an individual, but also their family and wider community.

“That experience brought the patient perspective to the forefront for me,” Jason says. “It showed me that the work we do matters, and that it can have a huge impact on patients, families and people living with rare diseases.”

Seeing how a new treatment could affect patients’ lives became a defining moment in Jason’s career. It kept him connected to the rare disease community and ultimately led him to lead ZS’s global rare disease practice.

The challenge: Turning scientific promise into patient access

For Jason, partnering with Every Cure felt like a natural extension of the work that has defined much of his career. Through ZS’s connections in the rare disease community, he was introduced to Every Cure and quickly connected with its mission of finding new uses for existing medicines. When the organization identified a need for a repeatable process to help bring promising therapies to patients faster, Jason saw an opportunity to contribute his team’s expertise in launch strategy, market development and patient access.

Jason Yaffe, Global Rare Disease Practice Lead

Jason says, “Every Cure’s mission is inspiring. The idea that a medicine already on the shelf could hold the answer for patients still searching for an effective treatment is powerful, especially when 95% of rare diseases have no available treatment. It was a privilege to help build something intended to move treatments toward patients faster in a way that is affordable, repeatable and impactful for the organization.”

Building a dissemination playbook

ZS partnered closely with Every Cure as the nonprofit was building its patient impact team. They began by working through several of Every Cure’s leading drug-disease opportunities to understand what it would take to advance each one from a discovery to real-world impact. The challenge was determining how to move each potential drug from a promising AI-generated insight to something that could ultimately reach patients.

From there, the team began mapping the decisions, activities and stakeholders required to advance each prospect. Some required physician education, while others involved regulatory engagement, clinical evidence generation or patient advocacy efforts. By comparing these different pathways, the team discovered common patterns and grouped them into categories.

Those findings became the foundation of a Dissemination Playbook: a modular, timeline-based framework designed to bridge the gap between AI-driven discovery and real-world patient impact. Drawing on both human expertise and AI-enabled analysis to synthesize findings across opportunities, the playbook helps Every Cure determine which development pathway is most appropriate for a given drug-disease match, what activities should happen when and which stakeholders need to be engaged along the way.

Every Cure now has a practical, repeatable approach for translating discoveries into action. As its portfolio continues to grow, the playbook can help the organization evaluate potential, prioritize resources and chart a clearer path toward patient impact. In this way, AI is not only helping identify potential treatments but also reshaping how organizations think about bringing those treatments to the patients who need them most.

Turning day-to-day expertise into pro bono impact

The project drew on more than ZS’s 40+ years of pharmaceutical launch and commercialization experience. Because Every Cure’s team brought a range of backgrounds and perspectives, the ZS team also relied on skills that are central to consulting: bringing structure to an open-ended problem, listening closely to understand what a partner needs and translating pharma experience into a useful, accessible tool.

Jason also credits the team’s initiative. The project did not begin with rigid timelines or expectations, but the ZSers involved were motivated to overdeliver and equip Every Cure with the strongest tools possible. Internally, ZS supported the work by enabling team members to dedicate time, people and resources to pro bono engagement.

Finding purpose and building a career at ZS

Jason’s journey also reflects what he sees as distinctive about building a career at ZS. He describes the culture as entrepreneurial, with room for people to shape their path around the topics that inspire them. For Jason, that meant focusing his career on rare diseases. Other ZSers may build similar depth in areas such as oncology, cell and gene therapy, patient experience or patient services.

Jason’s advice is to “Find something that inspires you. Find something you want to wake up to every day and make better in the world. If you keep that ultimate objective front and center, good things will happen.”

Through work with Every Cure, Jason and the team connected that sense of purpose with practical expertise. They helped create a tool intended to make promising science more actionable, extend the capacity of a mission-driven organization and, ultimately, support a faster path toward treatments for communities still waiting for answers.