Month: May 2015

Categories
Clinical Care Education General Newborn Screening Policy

Mld Family Conference™ – Register Now!

MLD Family Conference™ - Pittsburgh 2014 - low
MLD Family Conference™ – 2014 Pittsburgh … click to enlarge

Registration for our 2105 MLD Family Conference in Newark Delaware is underway and closes in just a couple of weeks.  If you are a MLD Family we’re anxious to have you register.

Many of your MLD Family will be there to meet, share, and socialize with.
Please bring your MLD loved one with you – we not only want to meet them, we have a special professional photographer to take your family’s photo while capturing the spirit of our special loved ones and the MLD journey through photography.
You will again find familiar faces in the Respite room to care for your other children and your MLD loved ones.
Those with MLD angels are always lovingly encouraged to attend – you have so much to share with the rest of us and you will surely find folks that “just get it”.
Conference details and an agenda are here: http://mldfoundation.org/mldfc/mld2015-de.php  We’ve organized some travel grants as well as registration scholarships if you need some help.
Some other highlights:
* Dr. Biffi will be attending (in person) and sharing/discussing the Milano gene therapy clinical trial.
 
* Shire will be discussing their ERT clinical trial status and sharing some interim results.
 
* Newborn screening … updates on the assay development, federal/state policy & actions, and the RUSP Roundtable we are organizing … and how you can help!
* On Saturday, as usual, you will drive the Practical Care agenda, … including a discussion about medical marijuana  & CBD oil .
* We’re working hard on a special fun Saturday evening event, a memorial butterfly release, the traditional MLD “bashing”, and MLD After Hours.
We have many of the global MLD experts attending so you can meet them and ask any questions you may have.
With travel support and scholarships available, all you need to do is register!  You can defer paying the modest registration fees for a few weeks if you need to, but we want to know you are coming so we save the right number of sleeping rooms!
Categories
Awareness Clinical Care General Research

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.”
We are excited about the multi-disciplinary approach of collaborative and comprehensive care this center is now providing for leukodystrophy patients and families. Under the directorship of Dr. Amy Waldman, care plans are being developed by teams of specialists, with a designated CHOP care coordinator and extensive family/caregiver involvement. The CHOP team will include a standard suite of specialists and will include additional experts from other CHOP specialties who will come and go as situations arise. Appointments and treatments will be consolidated into one day’s visit, where possible, so families don’t have to make multiple trips to the CoE thereby improving the scope of care and reducing the burden on families and patients. We are planning to have representatives from CHOP come and present at our MLD Family Conference™ in Delaware this July.  We also hope to hear 1st hand reports from Philly area families about the CHOP CoE.
Dr. Escolar’s Program for the Study of Neurodevelopment in Rare Disorders (NDRD) at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, the White Matter Disease Program under Dr. Vanderver at Children’s National in DC, Dr. Eichler’s ALD Connect program at Boston Children’s, and the Kennedy Krieger Institute Moser Center for Leukodystrophies each offer similar but independent programs, each with their own focus and roots.
MLD Foundation is an avid supporter of helping these existing centers work more closely together to improve patient care for all the leukodystrophies and to improve how network and clinical data is gathered, shared, and studied to improve care, advance understanding, and expedite therapies. This will require helping the centers to work more closely, establishing common methodologies, expanding their capabilities to serve all leukodystrophies, and putting more uniformity and structure into the clinical care and research strategies.  As resources become available the program can be expanded to include CoE’s in other parts of the country so every leukodystrophy family has a CoE close to them.
We are actively working with GLIA (Global Leukodystrophy Initiative – a two-year old international collaboration of leukodystrophy clinical and research experts), industry pharma partners, advocacy groups, and other MLD experts to develop standards of care, registries for common data collection, resource directories, access to experts, training and awareness, and maybe even provide some seed funding to help new centers to launch.  Imagine if these experts were able to implement CoE’s for leukodystrophies at all of their home medical centers – what a powerful and accessible clinical care and research force that network would be.
MLD Foundation’s OpenNHS Manifesto offers a peek into how we think pre-clinical Natural History Study collaborations should operate.  We’re thinking the CoE picture should have similar overriding and undergirding principles. Maybe an OpenCoE Manifesto is in order?

Congratulations to CHOP!

Read CHOP’s press release here