Last summer my sister Becky came to me with an idea.
She wanted my help building a platform at CNBC to shine a spotlight on the 30 million Americans living with a rare disease.
Becky hoped this would help give a voice to the millions of people often overlooked by the medical community…who suffer from illnesses most of us have never heard of.
Their vision was to create a space for this community – a space that would connect people to the incredible work already being done by rare disease advocacy groups, and build on that to reach CNBC’s unique audience – an audience with the power and influence to help create change for rare disease patients and their families.
I was intimidated by the challenge. Not just because of the amount of work I knew it would take to meet our start date, but also because of the level of empathy and responsibility I knew it would take to do it well. I wasn’t sure if I would be up to the task.
Luckily Becky and I weren’t alone.
Dozens of our colleagues have rallied behind CNBC Cures. They gave their time and talent to work on something that inspired everyone involved.
And thanks to their efforts, CNBC Cures found early success.
Since our launch on January 8th, we have aired well over a dozen stories focused on the rare disease community.
Over 20,000 subscribers have signed up for the CNBC Cures newsletter, making it one of the fastest-growing newsletters the network has ever launched.
We had thousands of listeners streaming episodes of The Path with Becky Quick, the Cures podcast series we launched in which Becky shares personal and emotional stories of people living with rare diseases.
We are also quite popular on social media: Cures videos have a combined one million views on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Our first annual CNBC Cures Summit, a live event where Warren Buffett shook hands with Boomer Esiason and Regeneron CEO Leonard Schleifer, sold out not long after registration opened. And the free livestream of the event had more than 8,000 views.
On Thursday we aired our hour-long documentary, CNBC Cures: Defying Rare Disease. In the special, Becky stepped out from behind the anchor desk to share her family’s private battle with rare diseases and talk about her daughter Kaylie’s SYNGAP-1 diagnosis. Through her stories and others like them, Becky revealed the harsh reality of patients caught between groundbreaking scientific advances and the persistent gaps in funding, access and support.
In the two months since Cures launched, we have spoken more consistently about the issues affecting the rare disease community than in the previous two years.
It didn’t feel forced and it wasn’t rushed. Because the message is important to people.
This speaks to the importance and relevance of these stories.
Through this process, I learned that almost everyone knows someone affected by a rare disease. And the issues we discuss – from regulatory reform to scientific innovation to access to medicines – are not just important to the rare disease community, but issues that matter to all of us.
They are the themes that will remain the driving force behind CNBC Cures, and the themes we will use to shape the stories we bring you from this incredible community.
But most importantly, we’ve heard a lot from you, our viewers and readers, over the last two months. We’ve received hundreds of emails…more than we could respond to – even though we’re trying.
You shared your stories with us and brought us into your lives. They have made us smarter, more relevant and confirmed that we are on the right track.
This is the justification we need to know that this is an area worth investing in as a network.
Thank you for your continued support and for your inspiration.
And keep watching CNBC Cures, because we’re just getting started.
For more information about CNBC Cures, visit CNBC.com/cures. To sign up for the newsletter, click here. Click here to watch the latest episode of The Path with Becky Quick.
