Great Patient Focused Drug Development (PFDD) meeting at the FDA Tuesday discussing patients perspective on the neurological inborn errors of metabolism (IEM). Dean Suhr, president of the MLD Foundation, spoke on the second panel of the day and was able to both share and stir the pot a bit with regard to some of the patient perspectives on what we want in therapies, risk/benefit, access to trials in the US, compassionate/named access, patient reported outcomes, and consent. It’s not all about statistics and biochemistry – we have life to live!
Also met the Medical Officer at the FDA assigned to gene therapy and made sure she talked to Becky Vivian, a MLD mom who was there with her kids Eli and Ella showing the remarkable results from the Italian gene therapy clinical trial.
In the next couple of days we’ll be sharing how to add your voice to the formal written docket for this meeting. This is our opportunity for the MLD community to be heard so we hope for many of you to share.
A MLD grandmother was also present – we had a great talk. Turns out she is a researcher and has done some work at the NIH. She wants to work with us … and you … to write a paper on bone marrow transplant outcomes. We’ll have more to share on that soon too.