Drug tailored to one girl with brain disease paves way for similar customized treatments

Jocelyn Kaiser (Science)

October 9, 2019

After their apparent success treating a young girl with a drug tailored to counteract a genetic mutation that had given her a usually fatal brain disease, the researchers behind the innovative strategy have this week laid out criteria for similarly helping more sick children. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is cautioning that such one-off therapies need to be thoroughly considered before moving ahead and carefully evaluated, in part because desperate parents sometimes perceive improvements from a treatment that are not real.

In early 2017, after hearing of 6-year-old Mila Makovec, who had a condition called Batten disease that progressively damages brain cells and leads to death by adolescence, neurologist Timothy Yu of Boston Children's Hospital and co-workers offered to try to help. They quickly designed and had a company synthesize a strand of RNA intended to mask a mutation in a gene called CLN7, which over time was causing Mila's brain cells to accumulate waste and die. They first showed the potential drug, an antisense oligonucleotide that they dubbed "milasen," could correct the CLN7 defect in cells cultured from her skin. With FDA approval, in January 2018 they then began to infuse the RNA into her spinal fluid. The team soon saw improvements in Mila's condition, such as fewer and shorter seizures, Yu reported at a meeting 1 year ago.

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KAISER, J. (n.d.). Drug tailored to one girl with brain disease paves way for similar ... https://www.science.org/content/article/drug-tailored-one-girl-brain-disease-paves-way-similar-customized-treatments