Why did Patrick Girondi, a successful singer and songwriter, become the founder and CEO of a pharmaceutical company? Originally from the South Side of Chicago, Girondi dropped out of high school and became a musician and also, quite by accident, a highly successful commodities trader. In the early 1990s, his young son Rocco was diagnosed with thalassemia, a rare blood disorder caused by a defect in the globin genes. Girondi was told by doctors that his son would not live to be a teenager. So Girondi set out to find a cure. His company has been working on developing gene therapies and treatments for rare blood disorders such as thalassemia and sickle cell disease. He’s now recruiting for clinical trials, and his son will be among the first to receive his new treatment for thalassemia in the coming months. When I sat down with Girondi to hear his life’s story, he told me: “San Rocco Therapeutics … has become involved in so many different rare diseases, because people would reach out to us. Parents, in desperation, would read about me, find my story, find me. Sometimes through friends. … Sometimes they would come to me after concerts.” There are 6,000 rare diseases in the world, also called “orphan diseases,” he says, because nobody wanted to invest in expensive research to find a cure. Girondi has released seven albums to support rare disease awareness, and he is the author of “Flight of the Rondone: High School Dropout VS Big Pharma: The Fight to Save My Son’s Life.” Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
