Boomer Esiason and son Gunnar win in the fight against cystic fibrosis

When NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason was about to step onto the New York Jets practice field in 1993, shortly after being traded to the team, he was quickly picked up to answer an urgent call from his wife, Cheryl.

Her two-year-old son, Gunnar, was taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Shortly thereafter, Gunnar was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, an inherited genetic disorder that causes mucus to build up and damage organs in the body, particularly the lungs, often leading to permanent lung damage. Symptoms of the disease can occur at any age, but at the time the diagnosis was generally viewed as a fatal childhood disease.

Recalling the day with CNBC’s Becky Quick at the CNBC Cures Summit on Tuesday, Esiason said the first call he made after speaking to his wife was to his father. His second call was to sportswriter Frank Deford.

In the 1988 NFL season, as a member of the Cincinnati Bengals, Esiason won the NFL Most Valuable Player Award and attended an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., where Deford was the keynote speaker. While Deford was perhaps best known for his work in sports, he was also a staunch advocate in the fight against CF after his eight-year-old daughter Alex died from the disease.

“I had never heard of the disease and he was talking and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Esiason remembers. “I said [to Deford]’Can I help you? Can I help you raise money?’ So I went back to Cincinnati and became a fundraiser.”

Esiason said that when he spoke to Deford that day and told him about Gunnar’s diagnosis, he thought about giving up football to care for his son. However, Deford encouraged him to “use all of his powers to use every possible media to give a name and a face to this disease” to further the fight against CF, Esiason said.

“I looked at Sheryl and said, ‘No more. This is going to be a rocket and we’re going to take off,'” Esiason said.

CNBC’s Becky Quick interviews Gunnar and Boomer Esiason at the CNBC Cures Summit in New York City on March 3, 2026.

CNBC

This led to the creation of the Boomer Esiason Foundation, which serves as the leading patient advocacy group for the CF community and provides funds for a variety of causes including research grants, emergency assistance for affected families, and scholarships for students in the CF community pursuing higher education.

Esiason’s advocacy thrust Gunnar into the national spotlight, and months later the two were on the cover of Sports Illustrated with an article about the challenges faced by people with CF and the impact the Esiasons wanted to make.

But this battle had only just begun for Gunnar. Appearing alongside his father at the CNBC Cares Summit, he said that “caring for cystic fibrosis is extremely active and stressful,” and he described the hours he spent strapped to a nebulizer before going to school, having to wear a mechanical vest that cleared mucus from his lungs, eating through a feeding tube and the various other health challenges that came with his diagnosis.

“I was dealing with one pulmonary exacerbation after another,” Esiason said. He remembered coming home from college and talking to his doctor about running out of treatment options.

“At that point in my life, when I was 22 years old and graduating from college and everyone is moving to this city or that city and starting their career, I was back home, living with my parents, experiencing one health crisis after another,” he said. “I just remember feeling completely overwhelmed, like I needed to get out of this never-ending cycle of hell.”

This feeling led Gunnar to take part in a clinical trial for a drug called Trikafta in 2018, funded by the Boomer Esiason Foundation. Manufactured by Vertex PharmaceuticalsThe drug received expedited review from the FDA and was first approved for use in 2019.

“The opportunity felt like I could do something with my life even if the drug didn’t work,” he said. “Even if the trial failed, it was still an opportunity to contribute, and the most important takeaway from this time in my life is that patients, particularly in rare diseases, are a finite resource and the drug development industry cannot move forward without them.”

“When I was offered the opportunity to participate in the clinical trial, the answer was very quick: yes, not only to get out of the hell I was living in, but also to contribute to the broader CF community,” he said.

But miraculously, after taking the drug for just a few days, Gunnar said, “Everything was gone.”

“I woke up that morning, two or three days into a clinical trial. I remember waking up feeling rested for the first time in my life, and I was 27 years old,” he said. “I was always hoping for something, and I spent nights tied to my feeding tube, PICC lines, whatever, to the intravenous antibiotic, and within a few days it was just pure freedom.”

“Just won the Super Bowl.”

Boomer Esiason with his son Gunnar during Super Bowl Week on January 25, 1997 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Peter Brouillet | Getty Images Sports | Getty Images

The two Esiasons recalled attending a recreational hockey league game later that week, which they continued to do despite Gunnar’s health complications. Typically, Gunnar had to keep his time on the ice short due to his breathing difficulties and often coughed up phlegm when he returned from his shift.

But in this game, he extended those shifts, often on the ice for several minutes at a time, which Boomer Esiason said caused some complaints from his teammates but also raised a question in his mind.

“I’m sitting there and I don’t know what to say. He plays like he’s never played before, and after the game he drinks beer. We stopped to eat pizza, and because CF affects the pancreas and stomach, these kids don’t eat much. So he sits down and basically devours half a pizza, and I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on?'”

Esiason, who had believed his son was receiving a placebo in the clinical trial, said the moment Gunnar told him he was taking the drug and it was helping him, it was “like I had just won the Super Bowl.”

“Everything he went through in his life suddenly had a future,” he said.

In the years since, Gunnar, now 34, earned his MBA and began a career focused on novel health technologies. He also got married and now has two children – both through IVF. He and his wife used this experience to launch a new initiative for the foundation that supports CF families who want to have children using IVF.

In total, the foundation has raised nearly $200 million in the fight against cystic fibrosis and has played a key role in increasing the life expectancy of people diagnosed with the disease, many of whom now live well into their sixties and beyond—a remarkable shift for a disease that in the 1980s was once considered a disease that would keep children past elementary school age.

“It’s not the easiest thing in the world to bring something like this to the public,” Boomer Esiason said. “But I can tell you, if I hadn’t done what we did, and if Gunnar hadn’t been involved, we wouldn’t be sitting here today, and a lot of that has to do with putting a face on something that people don’t know about, and that’s what Frank Deford did for me in 1989, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do since 1993.”