Parents and caregivers of patients with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) take great interest in orphan drug development, soaring healthcare costs, patient assistance programs and controversial “right-to-try” legislation — all issues on the agenda during the upcoming Rare Disease & Orphan Products Breakthrough Summit. “One of the chief challenges of 21st-century…
This year's Boston Rare Disease Film Festival will Feature an SMA Documentary Gareth Burghes' documentary, Life & Atrophy, which runs 24 minutes, will be part of Disorder: The Rare Disease Film Festival — a first-of-its-kind event in Boston this early October. The festival covers more than two dozen rare diseases. The 30 films, which will be shown in seven screenings, range in length from one to 65 minutes. Life & Atrophy is billed as “a documentary following one family’s story to defy genetic fate.” Burghes said the idea for his movie stemmed from his geneticist father's involvement in clinical trials of SMA patients. It tells the story of Miles McIntosh, a 5-year-old boy with SMA type 2, as his parents, Nikki and Tony McIntosh, sign him up for a trial to test the recently FDA-approved therapy Spinraza. Burghes said that SMA “has gone from an orphan disease with nearly nothing known about it, to now having its first FDA-approved drug on the market, as well as other treatments in the pipeline. The film represents what can be accomplished when families, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies join together to solve complex diseases.” The Boston film festival is the brainchild of two fathers --Daniel DeFabio, whose son has Menkes disease, a rare disorder that affects only one in 100,000 newborns -- and Bo Bigelow, who's daughter Tess has a genetic disease that’s even more rare. Only 23 people worldwide have it; there isn’t even a name to describe her illness. The Rare Disease Film Festival runs Oct. 2-3 in Boston. The SMA documentary Life & Atrophy will air at 2:30 p.m. on Oct. 2nd .
At nine months of age, Brianna Albers was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type 2. As a 22-year-old college senior from Rosemount, Minnesota, she also struggles with social anxiety, dysthymia (mild depression), and disordered sleep. In society’s view, she says, that makes her a bit of a monster. “Disabled…
As potentially lifesaving, but costly, therapies become available for rare genetic diseases — such as Spinraza (nusinersen) for spinal muscular atrophy — neurologists are finding themselves in the increasingly uncomfortable position of deciding which patients are most likely to benefit, and how they can help families pay for such treatments. In response, the Minneapolis-based American Academy of Neurology (AAN) has formed a Neurology Drug Pricing Task Force to make recommendations and provide guidance to AAN members feeling overwhelmed at these tasks. Its goal, said Dr. Nicholas E. Johnson, a pediatric neurologist and assistant professor at the University of Utah who heads the effort, is to try to define a workable ground between “what the [treatment’s] label says” about who might receive it, and “what the insurance company says” about whom it will cover. “It’s nearly a full-time effort for a single staff person to work through the insurance approvals,” Johnson told SMA News Today in a phone interview from Salt Lake City, where he also has a practice. “This is a national problem from the physician’s side, because these drugs provide some risk in that they have to be administered through a spinal tap, and because these drugs carry such a high cost.” Spinraza received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2016 as the first disease-modifying treatment for all forms of SMA. Manufactured by Biogen, it has shown highly promising results in clinical trials in young children, but carries a high price tag. Treatment costs an average of $750,000 for the first year and $375,000 for every year after that. “We’ve been trying to get this medicine for a few adults with SMA and have been denied coverage,” Johnson said. “Thankfully, Biogen’s Patient Assistance Program has stepped in to help these patients out. In the long run, the AAN is there to provide advocacy for both neurologists and the patients they care for, and to make sure patients are provided medications that have disease-modifying, life-altering effects in a sustainable fashion.” Normally, doctors have some leeway in using new medications in various settings and on a variety of patients, Johnson said. But in Spinraza’s case, “even though it was approved for all ages and all types of SMA, there’s very limited data in adults who have SMA, so this is a real challenge for providers,” he added. The task force hasn’t yet offered any recommendations, and those made will require AAN leadership approval before being publicized. Besides Spinraza, therapies it will look at include Brineura for Batten disease, estimated to cost $702,000 a year, and Exondys 51 for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which costs an estimated $300,000 annually. “Even though it’s a rare disease, there are quite a few patients out there with SMA,” he said. “Utah’s state Medicaid budget is around $100 million a year. If you consider the costs of this drug for our 130 SMA patients, it would easily dwarf the rest of the budget. So we regard this as a very urgent issue.”
Biogen’s Spinraza (nusinersen), an expensive but lifesaving medication for thousands of babies born with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), is becoming available to more and more Americans as private and government health insurers either cover it or ease coverage restrictions. Eighty percent of Americans with private health insurance, and 60 percent…
In the roughly four months since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Spinraza (nusinersen) to treat all types of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) in both children and adults, dozens of hospitals and clinics across the nation have begun dosing patients. Yet insurers are reluctant to pay for…
