Article | Cai Tu said
Editor | Cai Tu said
He is the vice president of Jingdong with a fortune of more than 100 million , "Internet finance and tax" alliance president , "China's first electronic invoice", is "the first person of China's electronic invoices", and "the first person of China's electronic invoices".
The first person in China's e-invoicing, but also all the top colleges and universities are invited to invite guest professors.
According to all the standards of success to measure him, he is in the current society can grasp the right to speak.
For the first 43 years of his life, he stood in front of a glittering spotlight and was adored by all.
But everything in the 43-year-old year, a sea change, life winner into a terminal patient, from the body involuntarily trembling to the doctor issued a diagnosis, the king of the business world has long been a cloud of smoke, the rest is just a waiting for their own gradual withering of the patient.
His life, in this year began a countdown.
After the splendor, in addition to despair, bleak, and the heart full of unwillingness.
After a few turns, he turned his reluctance into motivation and decided to find a silver lining for himself - developing a new drug for ALS.
In this way, he picked up the familiar Internet as a weapon, using all the resources available, breaking down the barriers to research and development, looking for top experts, and establishing a pool of hundreds of millions of dollars in funds. For himself, but also for hundreds of thousands of patients to find a way out.
He is our hero today, Warrior fighting with tachyphylaxis - Cai Lei.
Cai Lei was born in 1978 in Shangqiu, Henan Province, in a small county, his father is a veteran, and he has been extremely strict with him since childhood. Under this strict discipline, Cai Lei's academic performance is very good, every test can be the first place, so there are students called him " alien", because only aliens, will be so smart.
What they don't realize is that Cai Lei's excellent academic performance is the only thing he can show.
In Cai Lei's childhood memories, his family has been very poor, he went to junior high school still wearing clothes with patches, and the toys he played with when he was a child were not wanted by the neighboring children, in addition to learning, it seems that life does not have a thing that can make him happy.
After high school, he spent two years to learn all the knowledge of high school, in the second year of high school to participate in the college entrance examination, successfully entered the Central University of Finance and Economics .
At that time, Cai Lei only wished that he could get rid of the poverty that was weighing him down faster and faster.
Having tasted the pain of poverty, after graduating from the university, Cai Lei has been put into the society without stopping, in order to be able to stop eating the pain of money, he is able to eat any pain.
First into the organization unit, but the meager income was girlfriend's dislike , in order to love, Cai Lei gave up the iron rice bowl , jumped into the foreign enterprises, has a high salary at the same time, but also lost all the time.
He is like a tireless "workaholic", full of eyes only work, but also because of this, his career more and more smooth, first in 2003 to become Samsung China headquarters tax manager, and then jumped to other companies.
For people say he is a "workaholic", he also made a special microblogging to do the explanation:
In 2011, perceiving that the Internet will become the trend of the times, Cai Lei made a decision that all people can not understand, left Vanke, went to the Jingdong development.
At that time, Vanke's annual revenue could reach 120 billion, while Jingdong was just a small company that had just developed. If we look at it now, Cai Lei's decision is undoubtedly visionary, but at the time, there were few people who could be so bold.
With the rise of the e-commerce era, Jingdong also took advantage of the east wind, becoming the leading domestic e-commerce platform. And with his years of business experience, Cai Lei has managed to multiply Jingdong's revenue by tens of times.
In the decade since, Cai Lei has had a string of enviable titles along with the rise of Jingdong:
"China's first e-invoice" and 2018's "Top Ten Tax and Finance Characters" , "China Reform Contribution Characters" , and he also served as an external mentor for Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the Academy of Social Sciences , and with his many years of hard work, he was honored to be the vice president of the Jingdong Group.
At the same time as his career success, Cai Lei also met the other half of his life.
He met his wife, who is 11 years younger and has a master's degree from Peking University Medical School, through a blind date.
In their second meeting, Cai Lei asked his wife to marry him, saying that he didn't have time to fall in love, and that if he felt it was right, he should just get married.
At first, his wife felt that Cai Lei is a liar, any man will not be in the second meeting, on the proposal.
But with the contact, the wife gradually realized that this boring man is even more boring than himself.
And the two uninteresting people have very similar views, they think, food and travel are luxury and waste of time. They both hate the idea of internalization, whether it's for themselves or for their partner.
And they both believe that marriage is a responsibility that must be fulfilled in life, in addition to love.
Thus, not long after they met, the two got married, and soon after the marriage, they had their love child.
At this point in time, Cai Lei, has a new life goal, the cause of more focused, hard work.
It seems that after having a home, a lover and a child, a person changes from a drifting duckling to a tree with its roots y rooted in the ground.
Cai Lei, who is full of energy, led the team all the way to the top and doubled the performance again.
However, when everything seems to be moving in the best direction, a nightmare is creeping up on him.
As usual, Cai Lei was dealing with business in the office, when suddenly he felt the muscles in his left arm beating wildly, or muscular tachycardia, to be precise. He thought it was because he was too tired and rested for a while and recovered.
Because the work is too busy, Cai Lei did not take it seriously, in addition to being responsible for the financial aspects of the group, when Cai Lei also took four startups, busy time, meal time can not be drawn out, which there is extra time to go to the hospital.
So, he dragged his feet for half a year, and because the situation did not improve, at the beginning of the second year, Cai Lei decided to go to the hospital.
He first went to the Union Hospital, neurologist Liu Mingsheng looked at his electromyography results, just that his disease is not very good, if you can be hospitalized, it is best to live for a period of time, but did not make clear exactly what the disease.
Cai Lei told the doctor, there is no time for hospitalization, hoping that the doctor can give him some medicine, home to eat.
But Liu Mingsheng did not give him medicine, but let him supplement some B vitamins on the line.
Hearing the doctor say no medication, Cai Lei was a little happy that he only had to take vitamins, which should not be a big problem. It was not until after the diagnosis that Cai Lei realized that his body was in a muscle tremor, which means muscle atrophy, and motor neurons are seriously dying.
This is the onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease commonly known as "tachyphylaxis," and ranked among the world's top five terminal diseases (tachyphylaxis, cancer, AIDS, leukemia, rheumatoid rheumatoid) , there is no clear biomarker for detection, so the misdiagnosis rate is extremely high.
If a doctor is not experienced enough, he or she will not be able to diagnose the patient easily.
Although the doctors at Xiehe Hospital didn't say anything specific about the disease, Cai Lei's symptoms didn't ease up, so he had to go to another hospital for a checkup, and then went to a number of hospitals until he met with Fan Dongsheng and was hospitalized to undergo a complete series of disease screenings that ruled out all the other possibilities for the disease, and only then did he get the most definitive, but also the most desperate conclusion.
These are the most important things you can do to help your family.
Fan Dongsheng told him that there is no cure for ALS.
Faced with such a rare and unknown disease, with no known cause, not even a direction for treatment, and no medication?
To this day, there is no cure for this disease, and the majority of patients will be diagnosed 3-5 years from the time of diagnosis to the end of their lives.
The process is brutal, as the patient does not die directly, but when all the motor neurons die, the heart and lungs are not supported, and the trachea is opened, connected to a ventilator, unable to speak, and unable to eat on their own, and having no control over the body's function.
Watching all the muscles gradually atrophy, limbs lose consciousness, and finally like a vegetable, lying on the bed by the infusion of life, until no longer able to support.
Some patients have described having this disease as "watching myself slowly wither away day after day and not being able to do anything about it."
The world's most famous "taper" is contemporary physicist Stephen Hawking, who, after being diagnosed at age 21, has struggled with the disease, even though he was nearly paralyzed after several years of illness. Even after years of near paralysis and a gradual loss of speech, he was still able to communicate with others through computers and speech synthesizers, as well as complete the world-famous magnum opus A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, and the "zero-gravity" flight experience.
Even in the later stages, with the disease, the whole body can only rely on the rotation of the eye to communicate with the outside world, are still tenacious life for 55 years, to know, this is in the ALS community is a miracle, due to the absence of a cure for ALS, the patient's survival after the disease is only 2-5 years.
At present, the only drug for ALS patients is a special drug called "Lirutai", which needs to be eaten continuously for 18 months, and is able to slow down life for more than two months, and the price of the drug is around $4,000, which is also a huge The price of the drug is around $4,000, which is also a huge expense for an ordinary family.
After the diagnosis of Cai Lei began a long examination and treatment, lying in the hospital bed, he remembered his father, the memory of the very few words, very serious father, because of cirrhosis of the liver, early left him.
That year he was in his third year of college, after a small place could not be cured, his mother brought his father to Beijing to see a doctor, during the hospitalization, he would often take time off work to take care of his father's condition was already very serious at that time, in the condition of the torment of his father, more and more thin, more and more grumpy, and sometimes yell, and sometimes silent tears, and it did not take long to pass away.
He thought of his father, and thought of himself, are just entering the middle age, life is close to the end, a moment, a variety of emotions come, pain, reluctance, despair intertwined , the whole six months, he did not sleep a solid sleep, and woke up three or four times a night, think about their own disease, guess how long they can live.
He had thought that he did not want to die, just like when he was fighting with his competitors for business, he told the other side:
"As long as I Cai Lei started to do something, you can't do it with me. Because I don't want to die, you want to die, you lose."
Now that the opponent has changed to ALS, he suddenly realized that he has long since lost the year's spirit of determination, he wants life, wants it.
Sometimes, standing by the window, see downstairs to pick up garbage homeless, he will be envious of his own, although the other side of the homeless rags, but at least the health of the living, at least able to run and jump.
What about yourself? The first thing you need to do is to get rid of all the so-called success and wealth, but what else do you have?
I've lived most of my life on the streets, and I realize that health is the most important thing.
This is how many people, after the loss of health, will have the realization.
In his despair, he even told his wife to get a divorce.
The wife realized that the man who had spent half of his life in the air was afraid that he would become a drag on himself, and he was afraid that he would leave him behind. The wife cried, she told Cai Lei: "Don't even think about it!"
In order to be able to regain his health, the man, who had prided himself on being an intellectual for half his life, began to embrace superstition, visiting fortune-tellers in the hope of gaining psychological comfort.
The fortune teller tells him that he is suffering from a lack of gold and water in his five elements, and tells him to change his name to Chai Runqian.
Subsequently, and find a feng shui master special look at the home feng shui, go to Songshan Shaolin Temple to visit the point master, every day to do meridian massage.
As long as the bystanders say useful methods, he has tried, and even because of the injection of expensive imported drugs, once a high fever of 39 degrees .
That's when he stopped trying, because he realized that it would only make the situation worse.
From the initial inability to accept, and then a few struggles, when the ups and downs of the mood gradually regained calm, Cai Lei looked at the daily ward to accompany their loved ones, and do not know that his father is about to leave his son, a thousand reluctant.
If he were alone, he would have ended his life one day without the disease.
But now he is not the same person he once was, how can he leave his wife and son to live alone?
Family, loved ones, both armor and soft underbelly, Cai Lei in that moment, incomparable sober, he has to pull himself together, take out the attitude of once with the work of the dead beat, and the disease dead beat to the end .
Chai Lei told his wife that he wanted to find a new drug that could cure cryosurgery.
His wife, who works in the field, knows that this is a mirage, but if he can pull himself together, why not?
With his wife's support, Cai Lei took action, first finding thousands of English-language papers from academic websites around the world, and then learning about what stage of research ALS had reached.
Cai Lei, who is very strong in execution, began a series of planning for the disease, first establishing a medical technology company specializing in the treatment of acromegaly, Beijing Aishekang Medical Science and Technology Company Limited.
Then he broke down the traditional medical information barriers and built a patient research database to collect information about patients with acromegaly.
To this end, he also specifically contacted a number of acromegaly care organizations, and invited the neuron expert Fan Dongsheng, together with the establishment of the "acromegaly mutual support home" information aggregation platform.
Watching Cai Lei run around in this way for something that has very little hope, some people have asked him, BrainStorm, which has been researching cryonics for more than 10 years, has not achieved any results, where is the confidence that you can solve this problem through the Internet?
Cai Lei said: "The Internet is by no means just a sharp tool, but also a set of underlying logic for decision-making. If you go through the original new drug development process step by step, defeat is not in doubt."
In this way, a moment never stopped Cai Lei, finally found more than 1,000 patients, we formed a specialized group of patients, always exchanging disease dynamics.
Cai Lei understands that whether it is scientific research or the development of new medicines, data is an essential focus, which is why he has created a "patient-centered, 360-degree, full-life-cycle medical research big data platform".
Once everything was in place, there was a need for more than enough money to sustain the R&D.
In today's society, the reason why rare diseases are so difficult to cure is that the incidence of the population is small, the market group is not large enough, R&D developers will naturally lack of motivation, and investors will rarely be willing to inject a constant flow of funds into these narrow fields.
Instead of investing in the development of new drugs for rare diseases, most pharmaceutical companies are more willing to research hypertension and diabetes, which are included in the health insurance for common diseases, or Alzheimer's disease, which is a type of neurodegenerative disease with an increasing incidence of the disease, after all, there is a sufficiently large market group to not worry about. The company has a large enough market base to not worry about selling out.
Cai Lei knows that businessmen have to talk about benefits and returns, and he visited more than 100 investment institutions to analyze today's pharmaceutical research and development market, telling them that there are countless pharmaceutical companies producing diabetes and hypertension medicines, and that Alzheimer's disease is basically a disease of the elderly, and they don't want their children to pay for their medical care. They don't want their children to spend money on medical treatment for them.
But the ALS disease is different, the age of the group is basically in the 40 to 60 years old between, as the backbone of the family, generally no matter which side of the husband and wife are sick, are considered smash pots and pans also want to slow down the life , after all, one person. If it is collapsed, it also means that the family will be scattered.
"ALS has 26,000 new people every year, I'll count on the existing 100,000 people, each willing to spend 1 million to cure, is 100 billion ah."
Listening to Cai Lei's calculations, many investors are a bit impressed, coupled with his hands, there are thousands of patients, as well as gradually improve the patient database, these are resources, as long as the research and development of new drugs can be a success, do not have to care about sales.
So, in his constant lobbying, finally pulled one or two investors, willing to give ALS new drug development to do financial support.
Now, a few years have passed, and in the battle against ALS, Cai Lei has spent most of his time, in addition to investing tens of millions of dollars.
And his efforts have not been in vain; the results obtained in just a few years are more useful than what most research organizations have studied for more than a decade and spent tens of billions of dollars on.
According to the data, today, in addition to creating hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, Cai Lei has also driven the development of six or seven drug pipelines, and established a well-sized animal testing facility in Asia.
Although ALS drug research has yet to reach the clinical trial stage, his work continues to give hope to the more than 200,000 people living with acromegaly around the world.
It's like in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy says:
"Remember, 'hope' is a good thing, maybe the best thing in the world, and good things never die."
To this day, Cai Lei, as well as other patients with acromegaly, continue to quietly fight against acromegaly, which is a struggle between human beings and life, but also a clash of capital and reality, no one knows when the war will end, but we can firmly believe that as long as we have hope, we will eventually win the war.
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