News

Finding treatments and potential cures for rare diseases is crucial, but so is the quality of patients’ lives — a rather nebulous term that means different things to different people. “Recently, there’s been much more of a focus on Quality of Life (QoL) issues, real-world evidence and patient-reported outcomes,” said…

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded EpiVax with a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant of $324,980. The company is going to use the funding to further develop its Personalized Immunogenicity Assessment (PIMA) tool, designed to assess risk of enzyme replacement therapy failure in patients with…

The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) will celebrate the 35th anniversary of both the 1983 Orphan Drug Act and NORD’s founding at a dinner tonight in Washington, D.C. The 2018 Rare Impact Awards, to be held at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, will be webcast via Facebook for those…

The European Union isn’t doing enough to protect the 30 million or so people with rare diseases who live in its 28 member countries, officials meeting last week in Vienna said. More than 900 people from 58 nations attended the 9th European Conference on Rare Diseases & Orphan Drugs (ECRD),…

Treatment with enzyme replacement therapy can help children with classic infantile Pompe disease reach adulthood. However, it fails to prevent the long-term effects of the disease in the brain and consequent   development of intellectual disabilities, a study shows. The study titled “Classic infantile Pompe patients…

Amicus Therapeutics is recruiting participants for the fourth group of its ongoing Phase 1/2 clinical trial evaluating the company’s investigative combination therapy AT-GAA. The trial (NCT02675465), called ATB200-02, will assess the safety, tolerability, and efficacy of AT-GAA in different groups of Pompe disease patients. The trial has treated…

Researchers have proposed a cheap, simple, and more sensitive screening test to identify Pompe disease and differentiate it from other neuromuscular disorders. The study, “Vacuolated PAS‐positive lymphocytes as an hallmark of Pompe disease and other myopathies related to impaired autophagy,” was published in the Journal of Cellular Physiology.

April 15 was International Pompe Day, and Amicus Therapeutics helped to raise awareness about the disease, as well as Fabry disease, by participating in several activities throughout the month, which also is designated Fabry Disease Awareness Month. Fabry disease is an inherited lysosomal storage disorder caused by deficiency of…

Interim results a from Phase 1/2 clinical trial support the therapeutic benefits of investigational therapy combination ATB200/AT2221 in patients with Pompe disease. Participants in the study showed improvements in motor and respiratory function. The therapy also resulted in a durable decrease of muscle damage biomarkers. These results will be presented…

Duke Health researchers are planning to launch a Phase 1 trial to test the safety of a new investigational gene therapy they developed to treat patients with Pompe disease. They are currently screening (NCT03285126) adults with late-onset Pompe disease to select eligible participants for the upcoming trial.