When Fadesola Adedayo’s older brother died, the 24-year-old Toronto resident took up running.

“It really helped me out of my depression,” Adedayo says.

He started slowly, but by June 2013 — 14 months after his brother’s death — he was running 130 kilometres a week.

Last summer, Adedayo pushed himself further. One morning he ran 21.1 kilometres along Lake Ontario, rested a couple of hours, and then ran another 21.1 kilometres in the evening — the length of a marathon in one day. He did that for eight consecutive days.

An obsessive idea had taken shape: to go to Nigeria, his country of birth, and run 17 marathons in 17 days. The goal is to raise research funds to battle Stevens-Johnson syndrome, the rare skin condition that killed his beloved brother, Adeyosola.

“He was like a father to me,” Adedayo says.

Adedayo was born into a middle-class family in Lagos, the southern Nigerian city that is Africa’s largest. His mother was a pharmacist, his father a doctor who founded the first medical clinic in Ijora-Badia, a teeming slum near Lagos’s main port.

Adedayo’s brother was seven years older, the first-born of three siblings. A strong bond developed through what Adedayo calls “mundane” things, such as playing soccer, and Adeyosola walking him home from school. Later in Canada, Adeyosola would calm him when kids made fun of his name, and give him advice about girls when he was a teen.

“He was always there to help and to give a kind word of encouragement,” Adedayo says. “He was the kind of guy who always did the right thing.”

Adedayo’s parents moved the family to Toronto when he was 10, largely to give better educational opportunities to their children. They settled in the Bathurst St. and Lawrence Ave. area. Adedayo studied at Upper Canada College and later Western University, where he graduated as a civil engineer. He has since set up a website that sells clothes from African designers, but business is slow.

His parents moved back to Nigeria after several years; his father, unable to practise as a doctor in Ontario, had grown tired of working as a window cleaner.

Adedayo’s brother went to England to study medicine in Birmingham. He became a pediatrician and later earned an MBA. He stayed in shape and once ran the London Marathon.

“He was, like, the golden boy of our family,” says Adedayo, whose sister is also a physician.

Adeyosola married another doctor in 2008 and three years later moved back to Nigeria. He worked weekends at a medical clinic in a Lagos slum while laying the groundwork for different business ventures, including bringing high-speed Internet to Ibadan, a large city in the south.

In March 2012, six months after the birth of his son, Adeyosola noticed blood on his hands after treating an HIV patient. He took medication to prevent HIV infection and experienced a severe skin reaction. In two weeks, he was dead. He was 27.

Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis are considered variants of the same condition. Both are extremely rare — up to 1.2 cases per million people per year. For HIV-infected people, the rate is 1,000 cases per million, according to a 2014 report by the World Health Organization. Mortality rates for SJS are 1 to 5 per cent; for EPN, 25 to 30 per cent.

The condition is most often a severe reaction to medication. Some 200 drugs have reportedly been linked to it, including antibiotics, antivirals and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs regularly used to treat arthritis. It starts with a red rash extending rapidly over the limbs and face, followed by blisters that merge and result in sheets of skin detaching.

News of his brother’s death, Adedayo says, “was crushing.” He wants to help researchers find a cure for the skin condition.

He plans to start his 17 straight marathons in late March, running from Abuja to Lagos, a route he considers relatively safe. He chose the number 17 because it’s how many official-length marathons he can run between those cities.

His goal is to raise $1 million, which he says will be held in trust by a non-profit company he has established, the Ade Skin Foundation. Most of the money will be used to fund research projects to combat the skin condition. Adedayo hopes to attract scientists to the board to help choose proposals.

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He has also signed a deal with Doctors Without Borders, guaranteeing they’ll get a percentage of the money raised. Until more people are appointed to the foundation’s board, the trust will be controlled by Adedayo and his friend Filipe Juliao, the marathon project’s co-ordinator. Adedayo says he’ll provide a public accounting of how the donations are spent twice a year.

Helping him on his run are a handful of university buddies. Adedayo says he has already shipped the 1,440 bottles of Gatorade he expects to consume. His campaign got a boost late in December when former Toronto mayor David Miller tweeted to his 36,000 followers a video of Adedayo training.

“I think my brother would be proud of me,” Adedayo says.

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