Editor | Cai Tu Shuo

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

According to all the standards in the sense 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 at the age of 43, everything changed dramatically, and the winner of life became a terminally ill patient. From the involuntary trembling of the body to the doctor's diagnosis, the king of business has long been a thing of the past, and the rest is just 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 a full heart of unwillingness.

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

In this way, he picked up the familiar internet as a weapon, used all the resources he could, broke down the research and development barriers, searched for top experts and established hundreds of millions of fund pools. Find a way out for yourself and hundreds of thousands of patients.

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

Cai Lei, 1978 was born in a small county town in Shangqiu, Henan Province. His father was a veteran and he was very strict with him since childhood. 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 that Cai Lei can get.

In the memory of Cai Leier's childhood, his family was always poor. He was still wearing patched clothes when he was in junior high school, and the toys he played with when he was a child were also rejected by the children in his neighborhood. It seems that there is nothing in life that can make him happy except studying.

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

At that time, Cai Lei only hoped to hurry up and get rid of the poverty that overwhelmed him.

Having tasted the misery of a poor family, after graduating from college, Cai Lei devoted himself to the society all the time. In order to be free from the bitterness of money, he can eat anything.

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

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

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

20 1 1 year, sensing that the internet would become the trend of the times, 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 reach120 billion, while JD.COM was just a small company. If it seems to us now that Cai Lei's decision is undoubtedly far-sighted, at that time, there were very few people who could have such courage.

With the rise of the e-commerce era, JD.COM has also become a leader in domestic e-commerce platforms through the east wind. Cai Lei, by virtue of his many years of business experience, has successfully doubled the income of JD.COM.

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

"China's No.1 Electronic Invoice", "Top Ten Financial and Tax Figures of the Year" in 20 18, and "China's Contribution to Reform". At the same time, he also served as an off-campus tutor of Peking University, Tsinghua and Academy of Social Sciences, and he 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 through blind date. His wife is younger than him 1 1 years old, and she is a master of Peking University Medical College.

When they met for the second time, Cai Lei proposed to his wife. He said that he didn't have time to fall in love, so he could just get married if he felt fit.

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 discovered that this boring man was even more boring than himself.

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

And they all believe that marriage is a responsibility that must be fulfilled in life besides congeniality.

In this way, it was not long before they met, and they got married. After marriage, they soon had the crystallization of their 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 home, a lover and a child, people have changed from duckweed wandering around to a big tree with roots deeply rooted in the ground.

Cai Lei, who is full of energy, led the team to triumph all the way and doubled its performance again.

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

As usual, Cai Lei was dealing with official business in the office. Suddenly, he felt the muscles on his left arm beating wildly. To be precise, it should be muscle tachycardia. He thought it was because he was 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 four startup companies at that time. When he was busy, he couldn't spare time to eat, so there was no spare time to go to the hospital.

So a delay, it dragged on for half a year, because the situation did not improve, 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, the chief physician of neurology department, looked at the results of his electromyography examination. He just said that his illness was not very good. If he could be hospitalized, he had better stay for a period of time, but it was not clear what the disease was.

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 and go home to eat.

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 he didn't need to take medicine, but only took vitamins. That shouldn't be a big problem. It was not until after the diagnosis that Cai Lei realized that when muscle tachycardia appeared in his body, it meant that the muscles were shrinking and the motor neurons were seriously apoptotic.

This is the symptom of onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as "gradual freezing", which ranks first among the five terminal diseases in the world (gradual freezing, cancer, AIDS, leukemia and rheumatoid). At present, there is no clear biomarker for detection, so the misdiagnosis rate is extremely high.

Unless doctors have enough experience, they will not give patients a diagnosis easily.

Although the doctor of Union Medical College Hospital didn't say the 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 saw Fan Dongsheng, and 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 is equal to no medicine.

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

Up to now, patients with this disease have no precedent of being cured, and most patients will end their lives in 3-5 years after being diagnosed.

The process is also extremely cruel. The sick 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".

Watching all the muscles gradually atrophy, limbs lose consciousness, and finally like a vegetative state, lying in bed with infusion to continue life until it is no longer able to support.

Some patients have described it as "watching yourself wither day by day and being powerless" after getting this disease.

The most famous "frozen man" in the world is the contemporary physicist Hawking. After he was diagnosed at the age of 2 1, he has been struggling with the disease. Even though he was almost paralyzed after several years of illness, his language ability gradually lost. He was still able to communicate with others with the help of computers and language synthesizers, and completed the sensational masterpiece A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to the Black Hole and the "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 turning its eyes, and they still live tenaciously for 55 years. You know, this is a miracle in the ALS world. Because there is no way to cure ALS, the patient's survival after illness is only 2-5 years.

At present, the only drug for ALS patients is a specific drug called "Li Ru Tai", which needs to be taken continuously for 18 months and can delay the life for more than two months. The drug price is about 4,000 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 had few words in his memory and was very serious. Because of liver cirrhosis, he left him early.

That year, when he was a junior, his mother took his father to Beijing to see a doctor. During his hospitalization, he often asked for leave to take care of him. At that time, his father's condition was already very serious. Under the torture of his illness, his father became thinner and more irritable, sometimes yelling, sometimes crying silently, and soon died.

He thought of his father and himself. He only entered middle age, and his life was drawing to a close. For a while, all kinds of emotions poured in, mixed with pain, unwillingness and despair. For half a year, he didn't sleep a solid sleep, and he woke up three or four times every night to think about his illness and guess how long he could live.

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

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

Now that his opponent has been replaced by ALS, he suddenly finds that he has long lost his high spirits, and he is desperate and wants it badly.

Sometimes, standing by the window and seeing a 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 healthily and at least run and jump.

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

I have lived on the rampage for most of my life before I know that health is the most important.

This is how many people will feel after losing their health.

In desperation, he even told his wife a divorce.

The wife understands that this man who has been in high spirits for half his life is afraid. He is afraid that he will become a drag on himself, and he is also afraid that he will leave him. When his wife cried, she told Cai Lei, "Don't even think about it!"

In order to regain his health, this man, who has 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 LMNT was short of water, so he changed his name to Cai Runqian.

Later, I invited a master of geomantic omen to watch the geomantic omen at home, visited the acupuncturist at Shaolin Temple in Songshan, and did meridian massage every day.

As long as others said it was useful, he tried it, and even had a high fever of 39 degrees because of injecting expensive imported drugs.

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

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

If he is alone, maybe one day in the future, he will end his life without the help of the disease.

But now he is not the duckweed he used to be, so how can he leave his wife and children to live alone in the world?

Relatives and lovers are both armor and weakness. At that moment, Cai Lei was extremely awake. He wanted to cheer up and take out the attitude that he had used to work and died of illness.

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

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

After getting 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 the disease. First, it set up a medical technology company-Beijing Eskang Medical Technology Co., Ltd., which specializes in overcoming gradual freezing.

Then, we broke the information barrier of traditional medical treatment, built a patient research database and collected information about patients with gradual freezing.

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

Watching Cai Lei rush about for a hopeless thing like this, someone asked him, Brain, an institution that has been studying gradual freezing for more than ten years, has not achieved any results. How can you have the 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 for a moment, has finally found more than 1000 patients, and everyone has formed a special group of patients to exchange information about their illness at all times.

Cai Lei understands that data is an indispensable key point in both scientific research and the development of new drugs, so he will create 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 be cured is that there are few patients and the market group is not large enough, so developers will naturally lack motivation, and investors will rarely be willing to inject a steady stream of funds into these narrow fields.

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

Cai Lei knew that it was necessary to talk about benefits and returns when talking with businessmen. He visited more than 100 investment institutions one after another and analyzed the current pharmaceutical R&D market. He told the other party that there were numerous pharmaceutical companies producing diabetes drugs and hypertension drugs in China, and patients with Alzheimer's Harmo's disease were basically elderly people, and they didn't want their children to pay for their own medical treatment.

However, the illness 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 one of the husband and wife is sick, it is necessary to delay their life. After all, if a person collapses, it means that this family will be scattered.

"ALS adds 26,000 people every year, so I will calculate it according to the existing100,000 people. Everyone is willing to spend100,000 to cure it, which is 1000 billion."

After listening to Cai Lei's calculations, many investors are somewhat intrigued. Plus, he still has thousands of patients and a gradually improved patient database. These are resources. As long as the research and development of new drugs can be successful, it is completely unnecessary to control the 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 have passed, and in the battle with ALS, Cai Lei spent most of his time on it besides investing tens of millions of dollars.

And his efforts have not been 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 on its own, and established a well-established 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 disease all over 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 gradual freezing disease are still silently struggling with gradual freezing disease. This is a struggle between human beings and life, and it is 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.