7-year-old boy raises $750,000 to help cure his best friend’s rare disease

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Dylan Siegel is a great friend to have.

In the past year, the 7-year-old Los Angeles boy has raised $750,000 to help his best friend, 8-year-old Jonah Pournazarian, who is battling a rare liver disease.

Dylan's best friend suffers from Glycogen Storage Disease Type 1b (GSD Type 1b), a life-threatening blood sugar disease. There's no known cure for the genetic condition.

Jonah's parents keep their son alive by feeding him a solution of water and cornstarch through a tube in his stomach "nearly a dozen times a day" to regulate his blood sugar levels.

"That's huge anxiety every night," Jonah's mother, Lora, tells ABC News. "We go to sleep going, 'We hope we don't miss an alarm clock because he could die.'"

Dylan wanted to help his friend, so, at the age of 6, he decided to raise money to help find a cure for the disease.

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"I heard that Jonah had a disease and then I felt bad for him that he had to drink corn starch every day and always check his blood and do all this stuff everyday," Dylan tells Lex18. "And if he didn't have this disease then he wouldn't be doing it. So then I wrote a book to help him stop doing all this bad stuff everyday."

And because Dylan believes his friendship with Jonah is "as awesome as a chocolate bar," he wrote a book titled "Chocolate Bar, The Book," with the hopes of raising $1 million for medical research to cure GSD Type 1b.

Dylan says "chocolate bar" in his book is code for "awesome."

"I like to help my friends, that is the biggest chocolate bar," reads the last page of the book.

"It's an amazing thing the fact that he didn't just have the idea, he followed through and he actually did it," says Debra Siegel, Dylan's mom. "And he was so persistent trying to get us to publish the book and sell the book. And he was really, really motivated."

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He started selling his books at fairs and online for $20 each.

At his first event in November 2012, he sold all 200 copies.

Since then, Dylan has sold over 16,000 copies worldwide, raising more than $750,000 toward his $1-million goal.

Every dollar raised goes to the the University of Florida lab where Jonah's doctor is currently conducting GSD Type 1b research.

Dr. David Weinstein, Director of the Glycogen Storage Disease Program at the University of Florida, tells ABC 7 that the influx of cash is making finding a cure "a reality."

"It's not just a dream that these children can be cured," Weinstein says.

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Weinstein says Dylan has already raised "more money for this disease than all the medical foundations and all the grants combined. Ever."

Dylan and Jonah are optimistic about the future. When asked where they'll be in 10 or 15 years, Dylan has a confident answer:

"High school, and probably his disease would be cured 'cause it's not going to take like 15 years to be cured."