Catching Up With 3 Rare Disease Families

Four-year-old Eliza O’Neill’s viral videos, the subject of my last two blog posts, continue to dominate the news media with another appearance on The Today Show June 17. Hopefully, her family’s fight to fund gene therapy for her rare disease, Sanfilippo syndrome type A, will focus more attention on the entire rare disease community – 30 million people in the U.S. alone.

That’s a lot of families.

Four years ago, I spent the summer getting to know the families whose stories became my gene therapy book. Thanks to social media we’ve stayed in touch, and I’ve met many others. All continue to astonish me. Here’s a catch-up with three families featured in past posts.

RUNNING BLIND TO BATTLE BATTEN DISEASE
Laura King Edwards posted at DNA Science a year ago about her younger sister Taylor, now 15, who was diagnosed with ceroid lipofuscinosis, neuronal type 1 – aka Batten disease – when she was 7. Recalls Laura:

“In the worst hour of our lives, we learned that my bright-eyed, golden-haired, intelligent sister – a second grader who loved to sing and dance and run and play – would go blind, have seizures, and lose the ability to walk, talk, and swallow food. She would deteriorate … confined to a wheelchair. She would have to have a feeding tube. Eventually, she would die – blind, bedridden, and unable to communicate.”

Laura eloquently captures her sister’s life and her family’s efforts to help fund a gene therapy clinical trial at her blog, Write the Happy Ending. A post from last week is particularly heartbreaking. Rather than charting her sister’s decline with brain scans or mobility tests, Laura notes that in the 6 weeks between haircuts, Taylor lost the ability to walk. Last week, she had to be carried up the stairs to the hairdresser. This week, she’s in the hospital.

To better get into her sister’s head, Laura runs races blindfolded.

“I do the runs for a variety of reasons. I’ve always been a runner, and running helped me face Taylor’s illness when she was first diagnosed. After watching her run the first of two 5Ks with her Girls on the Run team despite battling Batten disease (and she was already blind at that point), I started running in her honor. I mainly run for Taylor to raise awareness, but my runs have also raised money for Taylor’s Tale. The Thunder Road half marathon I ran with Dr. Steve Gray in November raised money for the (gene therapy) project at the University of North Carolina.

I’ve run 18 races for Taylor. Thunder Road was the only race I ran blind, but I went on 18 blind training runs to get ready for it.

During my months of training to become a blind runner and far more so in the months following the race, my sister slipped farther down the chasm of Batten disease. It is a deep, dark chasm. There are no footholds for climbing out, and some days, no light reaches her ledge. And yet, each day she teaches me something new about courage; each day, she imparts some great piece of wisdom without having to say anything at all.

My next challenge is to run a race in all 50 states for Taylor to continue spreading awareness of Batten disease and build support for the rare disease community. I’m kicking it off this summer!”

HANNAH’S HOPE AND LOVE BALL

Ten-year-old Hannah Sames also has a very rare inherited disease of the nervous system, giant axonal neuropathy (GAN). DNA Science told her story about a year ago too.

In GAN, intermediate filaments composed of a protein called gigaxonin overgrow and run askew, hampering nerve function. Hannah is very slowly losing mobility, and suffers from kidney stones and visual loss, as the lack of gigaxonin in various body parts makes its presence known in ebbing motor and sensory functions.

Dr. Gray (behind Laura in the photo above) began working on gene therapy for GAN before he took on the Batten disease project, and the GAN trial is set to begin within the next few months at the NIH Clinical Center. The trial is largely possible due to the constant networking, meeting-holding, and fundraising efforts of Hannah’s family – parents Lori and Matt, and sisters Reagan and Madison. Their Hannah’s Hope Fund (HHF) was born in the days following the diagnosis in 2008. The highlight is the annual ball, held in February in snowy Albany, NY, near the Sames (and my) home. From Lori:

“The Hope and Love Ball began 5 years ago when friends, Todd and Beth Silaika and Tim and Lee Wilson, approached us with the idea. The first formal gala in 2010 netted $90,000 and was a Valentine theme, fitting for February. Other themes followed: Monte Carlo, Mardi Gras, Midnight in Paris, and Candyland this year, which netted more than $165,000.

In 2010, HHF was awarded a $500,000 all-or-nothing matching challenge grant from Doris Buffett’s Sunshine Lady Foundation. The deadline to raise the funds was the night of the Ball. Snow kept Ms. Buffett (Warren’s sister) away the evening when more than 450 HHF supporters celebrated the success of the $1.2 million, 6-month “Hope for a Million” fundraising campaign. Ms. Buffett was the highlight of the event the following year.

To date, HHF has raised $6 million in 6 years, grassroots, with the vast majority of funds spent on the GAN gene delivery Investigational New Drug (IND) work. The FDA placed the protocol on “Active” status at the end of May, awaiting IRB approval of the GAN gene delivery system. Then trial recruitment can begin.

Unfortunately, Hannah, the inspiration of HHF, has a homozygous deletion mutation. She isn’t a candidate for the phase 1 trial because only missense mutation patients will initially be included. Hannah is awaiting the results of a non-human primate study aimed at inducing tolerance to an intracellular transgene in the CNS. If tolerance is achieved, it will likely be 10 months to a year before Hannah can receive gene delivery.”

(Hannah doesn’t make gigaxonin at all, and so introducing it into her spinal cord, via healthy genes in viral vectors, could trigger an explosive immune response. The other kids who will be in the trial make abnormal forms of the protein, and so their immune systems are already alerted that gigaxonin is a “self” protein.)

BIKE THE BASIN FOR CURING BLINDNESS

A few months ago at DNA Science, Kristen Smedley told how she and her husband Mike assembled a research team to pursue gene therapy for the CRB1 form of Leber congenital amaurosis, which has robbed their sons Michael and Mitchell of sight.

But the boys are more interested in having fun than recruiting researchers, so they dreamed up the hugely successful Bike the Basin event, a half-mile race at the Northampton Civic Center Basin in Bucks County, PA. Kristen continues.

“Back in summer 2011 when the Curing Retinal Blindness Foundation launched, I asked my kids to come up with a fundraiser that could get their friends involved and start getting the word out about our big mission. I wanted my boys to take the lead because while it’s nice that so many people want to help them due to their blindness, my guys need to be able to show the world that they can help themselves.

We gathered about 15 of their closest friends at my kitchen table and the boys pitched their idea of a bike event fundraiser. The kids brainstormed ideas of how to make it work (with parents taking notes and serving lots of ice cream) and Bike the Basin was born!

Just under three months later, the first event raised $20,000. The first three BTB events raised just over $200,000 combined, and the goal for 2014 (Oct 5th) is $250,000. We’ve raised about $80K so far!”

LOOKING AHEAD

The families who raise funds for gene therapy clinical trials begin with their own relatives in mind and perhaps as a way to channel their anxiety and fear into something productive. But their generosity extends much farther.

As rare disease-based communities form and strengthen, certain individuals emerge as catalysts. Laura King Edwards, Lori Sames, and Kristen Smedley are three.

Gene therapy will almost certainly be too late for Taylor, and possibly for Hannah. But the Smedley boys may one day be able to see. And Eliza O’Neill may find her way into a clinical trial before Sanfilippo syndrome darkens her sunny childhood, thanks to the efforts of the media to share her story, and the kindness of so many strangers. But Eliza is one child, representing one unicorn. There are so many more.

Whatever the future holds, the efforts of these brave families will reverberate for years to come, measured in the numbers of lives improved or saved.