The latest in my series of stories that hopefully make you say, “Wow! How did they come up with that?”
Bradley Burnam loved his job as a medical device sales rep because, as he puts it, he got to play doctor: wear scrubs, visit hospitals, and work with patients. But during one site visit he picked up a nasty infection on his scalp. Standard treatments didn’t work and his life quickly devolved into a never-ending battle with an aggressive, disfiguring, drug-resistant infection. He found himself stuck at home, sitting on the couch with an open head wound for weeks, then months, then years.
Like many frustrated patients before him, Burnam went online to see what he could find — or create — for himself.
He remembered colleagues talking about how Europe was often ahead of the U.S. in some areas of medicine so he focused his research on that region of the world. Clinicians in the UK were using an antiseptic called polyhexanide as a cleansing agent, but only in liquid form. He needed an ointment that would stick to his head wound and not evaporate after a few minutes. His particular foe – a gram-negative bacteria – was sneaky and found ways to branch off into new areas just when clinicians thought they had surrounded it.
Burnam set to work acquiring the ingredients and equipment for a do-it-yourself pharmaceutical manufacturing lab. Keeping costs low, his skunkworks included barrels of petroleum jelly, a garden shovel, a concrete mixer, and pipe warmers (he jokes that his nickname was “Breaking Brad” as a reference to the show about a rogue chemistry teacher, “Breaking Bad”). Once he had a concoction that did not burn his skin, but contained enough polyhexanide to potentially kill bacteria, he sent it off to a lab. For less than $1,000 they were able to tell him that yes, it killed his target list of enemies. Burnam applied the ointment to his wound and it slowly but surely began to close.
He hit the road again as a sales rep, this time traveling to medical conferences to give away samples of his topical antimicrobial treatment and learn directly from clinicians about their unmet needs. When he needed to raise money, he used a crowdfunding platform that allowed fellow patients to back him, in addition to professional investors. Fast-forward to today and Burnam is the founder and CEO of Turn Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical and medical device company with multiple FDA-approved treatments for wound and dermatitis care.
A medical crisis that didn’t kill him turned Burnam into a Rebel Health Seeker. He set out to find answers to questions that nobody but him seemed to be asking and, crucially, he did not give up. He then became a Solver, creatively acquiring the tools, knowledge, and materials he needed to invent his own cure. Clinicians and FDA employees played roles as Champions, sharing their expertise as Burnam navigated the unfamiliar mazes of chemistry, infection control, and regulation.
If you’d like to learn more about Burnam’s story, listen to his interview on The Pulse or the Dermatology Times podcast. And I’m pleased to announce that my book, Rebel Health, is now available as a paperback!
Image: Test tubes, by TNS Sofres on Flickr
Thanks for this inspiring initiative. Have you heard reports of Rebels motivated to keep going when hearing about others’ successes. It might be helpful to highlight how many time his efforts didn’t pan out until it did.
Danny, I love this question. I’m now thinking about how people openly share their experiments, ideas, failures, and successes in some of the communities I most admire: the Maker movement, diabetes device hackers, and the personal science/Quantified Self movement, just to name three. It is in openly sharing their mistakes that they can get targeted advice from fellow tinkerers and citizen-scientists. And by openly sharing their successes, they can build on them together.
I keep these Wow! How? posts very short so I did not have space to talk more about Burnam’s failed experiments, but he does acknowledge them openly in interviews. This fragment of a sentence is doing a lot of work, as you can imagine: “Once he had a concoction that did not burn his skin…”