Research

New Year’s Reflections … and Highlights from December Meeting in Boston

Happy New Year!  As we head out of the holiday season and into a new year, it is a time that we reflect on life, cherish family, and count our blessings for all that we hold close to our hearts. Holiday music has been playing everywhere you go for the past month; while I enjoy […]

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Centers of Excellence for Leukodystrophies and Lysosomal Disease

Earlier last month we had the opportunity to see several presentations about the Leukodystrophy Center of Excellence (CoE) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which opened today, May 1st. The mission of the [CHOP Leukodystrophy CoE] center is “to deliver cutting-edge, integrated, multidisciplinary clinical care, diagnostic evaluation, and therapeutics to infants, children and youth with inherited white matter disease.”

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openNHS Manifesto – Meeting Report

A meeting of researchers, clinicians, industry and academia was convened by the MLD Foundation on June 24th in Washington, DC to discuss the openNHS Manifesto we wrote about in this blog post. Since a NHS is not a therapy, NHS participants have historically be giving time, energy, and effort, not to mention exposing their MLD loved ones to occasional invasive

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ERT Phase I/II Clinical Trial Recruiting Completed

The Enzyme Replacement Therapy HGT-1110 Phase I/II clinical trial has been fully recruited.  Patients are participating from three continents; Europe, South America, and Australia. The primary purpose of a Phase I/II clinical trial is to study safety and to establish a target dosage for further study. The trial lasts 40-weeks so the last patient should complete their

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Report from FDA PFFD IEM meeting

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

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Join our call for OPEN Natural History Studies

A new Natural History Study (NHS) for MLD was launched a few weeks ago. We have taken the bold step of recommending that families NOT participate in this study … for now: It is our belief that all natural history studies be OPEN access, meaning the study data be maximized by being made available to other researchers from other academic

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Are normal enzyme levels enough to stabilize MLD?

A very interesting question came up today on the MLD Family Discussion List™ (a private list we run for MLD primary caregivers).  I thought it might inspire some thinking so I am sharing my answer here as well: I have a question and I don’t know if anyone has an answer but I am wondering if anyone

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Newborn Screening – Should a Viable Therapy be a Requirement for a NBS?

The requirements for adding a Newborn Screen (NBS) to the RUSP (Recommended Uniform Screening Panel by the SACHDNC/DACHDNC (Secretary’s Discretionary Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders in Newborns and Children) consists of four primary criteria: An acceptable treatment protocol in place that changes the outcome for patients diagnosed early with the disease An understanding of the condition’s

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Rare Disease Advocacy – Behind the Scenes

I ran across this article a few minutes ago. It’s a great insight into the challenges those of us working in rare disease advocacy working encounter. Every person and agency mentioned in this article is someone we at the MLD Foundation regularly come into contact with as we work on behalf of those with MLD.

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Intracerebral Gene Therapy Phase I/II Clinical Trial for MLD

We are pleased to share that a Phase I/II Intracerebral Gene Therapy clinical trial for MLD is now recruiting late infantile MLD patients. Dr. Patrick Aubourg and Dr. Caroline Sevin are the co-Principal Investigators. We have posted complete details of the trial, including inclusion criteria, here. This trial is based on many years of work in

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