In March 2019, the FDA released draft guidance on the design and implementation of natural history studies to support the development of safe and effective treatments for rare diseases. The document, Rare Diseases: Natural History Studies for Drug Development,[1] addresses one of the major challenges sponsors encounter when developing therapies for rare disease: the lack…
Expertise: Rare Disease 66 results
Decades of painstaking research have recently begun to yield gene therapy products that are delivering meaningful benefits to human health. The approvals of voretigene neparvovec-rzyl (Luxturna) for inherited vision loss, tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah) for lymphoblastic leukemia, and axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta) for lymphoma have ushered in a new era of therapeutics. With the rapid evolution of the…
In 1976, pop culture icon John Travolta starred in the made-for-television movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble about a young man with a compromised immune system. The premise of the film is that Travolta’s character has to decide between living in isolation behind a protective bubble or dying engaged with the physical world. Hollywood…
Quality and effective risk management are vital to every clinical trial, and their importance is greater still when working in rare indications. Your patient population is small, vulnerable, and geographically dispersed, so there’s limited data and little opportunity to replicate clinical trial results. It’s as if the phrase “get it right the first time” had…