Edit | Cai Tushuo

JD.COM, Vice President with a net worth of over 100 million, President of Internet Finance and Taxation Alliance, "the first electronic invoice in China", is a visiting professor invited by top universities.

According to all the standards of success, he is a person who can master the right to speak in the present society.

In the first 43 years, as the winner of life, he stood in front of the dazzling spotlight and was worshipped by the audience.

But by the age of 43, everything has changed dramatically, and the winner of life has become a terminally ill patient. From the involuntary trembling of the body to the doctor's diagnosis, the king of business has long since become a thing of the past, leaving only a patient waiting for him to wither gradually.

His life began to count down in this year.

After the glory, in addition to despair and desolation, there is also full of unwillingness.

After several flips, he turned his heart into motivation and decided to find an opportunity for himself-to develop new drugs to treat ALS.

In this way, he picked up the familiar weapon of the Internet, used all available resources, broke down the research and development barriers, searched for top experts, and established a pool of hundreds of millions of funds. Find a way out for yourself and hundreds of thousands of patients.

He is our hero today, Cai Lei, a warrior who fought against the freezing people.

Cai Lei, 1978, was born in a small county in Shangqiu, Henan. His father is a veteran and has been strict with him since he was a child. Under this strict discipline, Cai Lei's academic performance is very good, and he can get the first place in every exam, so some students call him an "alien" because only aliens are so smart.

What they don't know is that excellent academic performance is the only thing Cai Lei can get.

In the memory of Cai Leier's childhood, her family has always been poor. When he was in junior high school, he still wore patched clothes, and the toys he played as a child were also rejected by the children in the neighborhood. It seems that nothing in life can make him happy except study.

After entering high school, he spent two years learning all the knowledge of high school, took the college entrance examination in his sophomore year, and was successfully admitted to the Central University of Finance and Economics.

At that time, Cai Lei only hoped to get rid of the poverty that crushed him quickly.

After suffering from poor families, after graduating from college, Cai Lei devoted himself to society. In order to get rid of the pain of money, he can eat anything.

First I entered the office, but my meager income was rejected by my girlfriend. For love, Cai Lei gave up his iron rice bowl and jumped into a foreign company. At the same time, his salary is high and his time is wasted.

He is like a tireless workaholic, his eyes are full of work. Because of this, his career is getting smoother and smoother. First, he worked as a tax manager at the headquarters of Samsung Group in China in 2003, and then moved to other companies as a group tax manager and chief tax agent.

For everyone to say that he is a "workaholic", he also specially sent Weibo to explain:

20 1 1, foreseeing that the internet will become the general trend, Cai Lei made a decision that everyone could not understand, leaving Vanke and going to JD.COM for development.

At that time, Vanke's annual revenue could reach 654.38+02 billion, while JD.COM was just a small company. If it seems to us now that Cai Lei's decision was undoubtedly far-sighted, at that time, few people could have such courage.

With the rise of e-commerce era, JD.COM has also become the leader of domestic e-commerce platform through this east wind. With years of business experience, Cai Lei has successfully doubled JD.COM's income.

In the following ten years, with the rise of JD.COM, Cai Lei had a series of enviable titles:

"China's first electronic invoice", "20 18' s top ten fiscal and taxation figures" and "China's reform hero". At the same time, he served as an off-campus tutor of Peking University, Tsinghua and Academy of Social Sciences, and was promoted to vice president of JD.COM Group with years of efforts.

At the same time, Cai Lei met the other half of his life.

He and his wife met on a blind date. His wife is younger than him 1 1 years old, master of Peking University Medical College.

When they met for the second time, Cai Lei proposed to his wife. He said he didn't have time to fall in love, so let's get married if it suits him.

At first, his wife thought Cai Lei was a liar, and no man would propose at the second meeting.

But with the contact, the wife gradually found that this boring man is even more boring than himself.

And two boring people have very similar views. They all think that food and travel are luxury and a waste of time. They hate internal friction, both for themselves and their partners.

Moreover, they all believe that marriage is a responsibility that must be fulfilled in addition to comfort in life.

In this way, they got married not long after they met. After marriage, they soon had the crystallization of love.

At this time, Cai Lei has a new goal in life, and he is more dedicated and hardworking in his career.

It seems that because of having a family, a lover and a child, people have changed from wandering duckweeds to deep-rooted trees.

Cai Lei, who is full of energy, led the team to make great progress and create new achievements.

However, just when everything seems to be developing in the best direction, a nightmare quietly falls on his head.

As usual, Cai Lei handles official business in the office. Suddenly, he felt the muscles on his left arm beating wildly. Muscle tachycardia, to be exact. He thinks it's because he is too tired. After a short rest, he recovered.

Because of his busy work, Cai Lei didn't take it seriously. In addition to being responsible for the group's financial work, Cai Lei also took over four startup companies at that time. He can't spare time to eat when he is busy, so he has no spare time to go to the hospital.

So, it dragged on for half a year, because things didn't get better, at the beginning of the second year, Cai Lei decided to go to the hospital.

First, he went to the Union Medical College Hospital. Liu Mingsheng, chief physician of neurology department, looked at the results of his electromyography. He just said that his illness was not very good. If you can stay in hospital, you'd better stay for a while, but you don't know what the disease is.

Cai Lei told the doctor that he didn't have time to be hospitalized at present, and hoped that the doctor could prescribe some medicine for him to eat at home.

But Liu Mingsheng didn't prescribe medicine for him, but asked him to supplement some B vitamins.

Cai Lei was glad to hear that the doctor said that he didn't need to take medicine, just vitamins. That shouldn't be a big problem. It was not until after the diagnosis that Cai Lei realized that when there was muscle tachycardia in his body, it meant muscle atrophy and serious apoptosis of motor neurons.

This is the symptom of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as "gradually frozen person", ranking first among the five terminal diseases in the world (gradually frozen person, cancer, AIDS, leukemia, rheumatoid disease). At present, there is no clear biomarker for detection, so the misdiagnosis rate is extremely high.

Unless the doctor has enough experience, he will not diagnose the patient easily.

Although the doctor of Union Medical College Hospital didn't say specific symptoms, Cai Lei's symptoms didn't ease at all, so he had to go to other hospitals for examination. He went to several hospitals for treatment until he met Fan Dongsheng. He was hospitalized for a series of complete disease screening, excluding all other symptoms, and finally got the most exact and desperate conclusion.

Fan Dongsheng told him that ALS equals myrrh.

In the face of such a rare and unknown disease, because the cause is unknown, even the treatment direction can not be found, how to use medicine?

So far, patients with this disease have no precedent of being cured, and most patients will end their lives within 3-5 years after being diagnosed.

The process is also extremely cruel. The patient will not die directly, but when all the motor neurons die and the cardiopulmonary function is not supported, it is necessary to cut the trachea and connect the ventilator. Unable to speak and eat independently, they can only rely on nasal feeding or gastrostomy to "eat".

I watched all the muscles atrophy gradually, and my limbs lost consciousness. Finally, like a vegetative person, I continued to live in bed with infusion until I couldn't support it anymore.

Some patients described the disease as "watching themselves wither day by day and being powerless".

The most famous "frozen man" in the world is the contemporary physicist Hawking. After being diagnosed at the age of 265,438+0, he has been struggling with the disease. Even after several years of illness, I was almost paralyzed, and my language ability gradually lost. He can still communicate with others with the help of computers and language synthesizers, and has completed his representative works A Brief History of Time: From BIGBANG to Black Hole and Zero Gravity Flight Experience.

Even in the later stage, with the erosion of the disease, the whole body can only communicate with the outside world by rolling their eyes, and they still lived tenaciously for 55 years. You know, this is a miracle in the ALS world. Because there is no cure for ALS, the survival time of patients after illness is only 2-5 years.

At present, the only drug for ALS patients is a specific drug called "Lirutai", which needs to be taken continuously for 18 months and can delay life for more than two months. The drug price is about 4000 yuan, which is also a huge expense for ordinary families.

After the diagnosis, Cai Lei began a long examination and treatment. Lying in the hospital bed, he thought of his father, who was quiet and serious in his memory. I left him early because of liver cirrhosis.

That year, he was a junior, and his mother took his father to Beijing to see a doctor. During his stay in hospital, he often asked for leave to take care of him. At that time, his father's illness was very serious. Under the torture of the disease, my father became thinner and thinner, and his temper became more and more violent. Sometimes he shouted, sometimes he cried silently, and soon he died.

He thought of his father and himself. He has just entered middle age and his life is drawing to a close. For a time, all kinds of emotions poured in, mixed with pain, unwillingness and despair. In the past six months, he hasn't slept a solid sleep. He wakes up three or four times every night, thinking about his illness and guessing how long he can live.

He thought he was desperate, just like when he was fighting with his competitors. He told each other:

"As long as I started in Cai Lei, you all failed me. Because I don't want to die, if you die, you lose. "

Now that his opponent is ALS, he suddenly finds that he has lost his old high spirits. He is desperate and wants it very much.

Sometimes, standing at the window and seeing the tramp picking up garbage downstairs, he will think of himself enviously. Although the other person has no fixed place and is in rags, he can at least live a healthy life and at least run and jump.

But what about yourself? Aside from the so-called success and wealth, what do you have?

It took me most of my life to know that health is the most important thing.

This is how many people feel after losing their health.

In desperation, he even told his wife about the divorce.

The wife understood that the man who had been in high spirits for half his life was afraid. He is afraid of being a drag on himself and leaving him. When his wife cried, she told Cai Lei, "Don't even think about it!"

In order to regain his health, the man who claimed to be an intellectual for half his life began to accept superstition and visit fortune tellers, hoping to get psychological comfort.

The fortune teller told him that he was short of water, so he changed his name to Cai.

Later, Feng Shui masters were invited to watch Feng Shui at home, to see acupuncturists at Shaolin Temple in Songshan, and to do meridian massage every day.

As long as others say it is useful, he will try it, even because of injecting expensive imported drugs, he has a high fever of 39 degrees.

This made him stop tossing, because he found that such tossing would only make the situation worse.

From the initial unacceptable to the later struggle, when the ups and downs gradually calmed down, Cai Lei looked at coming to the ward to accompany his lover every day. He didn't know that his father was leaving his son, so sad.

If he is a person, maybe one day in the future, he will end his life without the help of illness.

But now he is not the duckweed he used to be. How can he live in the world without his wife and children?

Relatives and lovers are both armor and weakness. At that moment, Cai Lei was extremely sober. He wants to cheer up and take out his old attitude of working hard and dying.

Cai Lei told his wife that he wanted to find a new medicine to treat gradual freezing.

Even the wife who works in this field knows that, of course, this is a fantasy at the moment, but if he can cheer up, why not?

With the support of his wife, Cai Lei took action. He first found thousands of English papers from academic websites around the world to understand the stage of ALS research.

Cai Lei, with strong executive power, began to make a series of plans for this disease. First, a medical technology company-Beijing Asikang Medical Technology Co., Ltd. was established, which specializes in overcoming gradual freezing.

Then, we broke the information barrier of traditional medical care, established a patient research database, and collected the information of gradually frozen patients.

To this end, he also specially contacted some love organizations with frostbite, and invited Fan Dongsheng, a neuron expert, to build an information aggregation platform for the "Healing Mutual Help Home".

Watching Cai Lei rush about for such a hopeless thing, someone asked him, Brain, an institution that has studied frozen people for more than ten years, has achieved nothing. How can we have confidence to solve this problem through the Internet?

Cai Lei said: "The Internet is not only a sharp weapon, but also a set of underlying logic for decision-making. If you follow the original new drug research and development process step by step, there is no suspense in losing. "

In this way, Cai Lei, who has never stopped, finally found more than 1000 patients, and everyone formed a special patient group, communicating with each other all the time.

Cai Lei understands that data is an indispensable key point in both scientific research and new drug research and development, so he will build a "patient-centered, 360-degree, full-life medical research big data platform".

When everything is ready, there needs to be enough funds to maintain the research and development work.

In today's society, the biggest fundamental reason why rare diseases are difficult to cure is that there are few patients and the market group is not large enough. Developers will naturally lack motivation, and investors will rarely be willing to inject a steady stream of funds into these narrow fields.

Most pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to invest in the research and development of new drugs for rare diseases, but prefer to study specific drugs for common diseases such as hypertension and diabetes, which are listed in medical insurance or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, and their incidence is increasing year by year. After all, there is a large enough market group to sell.

Cai Lei knows that when talking with businessmen, it is necessary to talk about benefits and rewards. He has visited more than 65,438+000 investment institutions and analyzed the current pharmaceutical R&D market. He told the other party that there are countless pharmaceutical companies producing diabetes drugs and hypertension drugs in China, and Alzheimer's patients are basically elderly people, and they don't want their children to spend money to see a doctor.

However, the disease of ALS is different. The age of the group is basically between 40 and 60 years old. As the pillar of the family, no matter which spouse is sick, it will delay their lives. After all, when a person collapses, it means that the family is going to break up.

"ALS adds 26,000 people every year. I will calculate according to the existing 65438+ 10,000 people. Everyone is willing to spend 65.438+0 billion to cure, which is 65.438+0 billion. "

After listening to Cai Lei's calculations, many investors are a little curious. In addition, he has thousands of patients and a gradually improved patient database. These are all resources. As long as the research and development of new drugs can be successful, there is absolutely no need to control sales.

So, under his constant lobbying, he finally got one or two investors who were willing to provide financial support for the research and development of new drugs for ALS.

Now, a few years later, in the battle with ALS, Cai Lei spent most of his time on it, except tens of millions of dollars.

His efforts were not in vain. The results obtained in just a few years will be more useful than what most research institutions have studied for more than ten years and spent tens of billions on research.

According to statistics, Cai Lei has not only established a foundation with hundreds of millions of funds, but also promoted the research and development of six or seven drug pipelines and established a perfect animal experimental base in Asia.

Although the drug research on ALS has not yet reached the clinical trial stage, his actions still bring hope to more than 200,000 patients with gradual freezing around the world.

Just like in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, Andy said:

"Remember,' hope' is a good thing, maybe the best thing in the world, and good things will never die."

Today, Cai Lei and other patients with gradually frozen human disease are still silently fighting against gradually frozen human disease. This is a struggle between human beings and life, and also a collision between 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.