Zolgensma, approved for children with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) up to 2 years old, has two claims to fame: It is both the first gene therapy ever developed to treat a neuromuscular disease, and it’s by far the world’s most expensive drug. At $2.125 million, a 60-minute intravenous…
RaDaR, the catchy new name for the U.S. government-run Rare Diseases Registry Program, aims to help patient advocacy groups with limited resources build their own disease registries. The site was developed by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a division of the National Institutes of…
With 250 rare diseases newly identified every year, scientists can barely keep up — even as the healthcare system fails millions of Americans whose rare diseases have already been diagnosed. That’s the warning from Christopher P. Austin, MD, director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Studies (NCATS) at…
Cumbersome security procedures, rising airfares, and shrinking legroom have made commercial air travel difficult enough these days — even for healthy passengers. Imagine how much harder it is for patients with rare diseases who must get to doctors’ appointments or clinical trials that are hundreds of miles away from home.
With an estimated 1.37 billion inhabitants, India will likely surpass China in five years as the world’s most populous country. That also means it will have more rare-disease patients than any nation. It already has more than twice as many as the 28-member European Union. Harsha K. Rajasimha, a genomics…
For more than four decades, comedian Jerry Lewis hosted the MDA Labor Day Telethon on behalf of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. That annual event helped the MDA become the nation’s largest non-government source of funding for neuromuscular disease research, with more than $1.4 billion disbursed since its establishment 68…
Five states — Missouri, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania and Utah — now routinely screen newborn babies for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), while another 13 have passed laws either requiring such screening or are in the process of doing so. Pennyslvania began testing infants for the neuromuscular disease on March 1,…
Madeline Collin, a 24-year-old activist with Gaucher disease, worries that patients like her will suffer deeply if Britain leaves the European Union (EU), as scheduled, at the end of this month. Collin is an expert on the subject. For her University of Bathdissertation, she analyzed Brexit’s long-term impact…
With each new advance in medicine comes ethical dilemmas, from fertility treatments and newborn screening, to vaccinations, gene therapies and euthanasia. But rare diseases and the expensive therapies needed to treat them — particularly in an age of scarce economic resources — almost always entail “tragic choices,” warned Avraham Steinberg,…
A drug appraisal committee of Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) met in Manchester, England, for the third and final time March 6 to decide whether to recommend Spinraza (nusinersen) for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). Several hundred demonstrators organized by the nonprofit group…
