Tag: shire

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
Advocacy General Research

openNHS Manifesto – Meeting Report

A meeting of researchers, clinicians, industry and academia was convened by the MLD Foundation on June 24th in Washington, DC to discuss the openNHS Manifesto we wrote about in this blog post.

Since a NHS is not a therapy, NHS participants have historically be giving time, energy, and effort, not to mention exposing their MLD loved ones to occasional invasive and potentially painful testing with limited feedback from the NHS study teams.

The openNHS Manifesto …

  • recognizes the importance of NHS to better understand the disease and as a baseline to determine efficacy and obtain regulatory approval of new therapies.
  • calls for the NHS study team to be well-informed about MLD and to give back to the participants ideas and insight into improving the participants quality of life and ongoing clinical care.
  • calls for study sponsors to collaborate pre-clinically up front with other researchers and industry to design a study that meets the sponsor’s needs as well as  reasonably anticipated future needs
  • calls for study data to be open and accessible as raw data (in its entirety) to future researchers.  The Manifesto recognizes that some limited time protection may be necessary to honor publishing and IP rights.

At the DC meeting there was extensive discussion and sharing of perspectives and concerns about openNHS from many points of view.

We are pleased to report the meeting was a success on all fronts!  MLD Foundation, on behalf of those affected with MLD and the ongoing research community, was able to facilitate full support of the Manifesto and will be working with MLD collaborators in general, as well as Shire as sponsor of the current US late infantile NHS, to implement the Manifesto on current and future MLD Natural History Studies.

We look forward to sharing more specifics about what this means to MLD families and NHS study participants in the near future.

We will also be sharing our success with other advocacy groups with the hope that they too can call for openNHS in their communities.

Categories
Research

ERT Phase I/II Clinical Trial Recruiting Completed

The Enzyme Replacement Therapy HGT-1110 Phase I/II clinical trial has been fully recruited.  Patients are participating from three continents; Europe, South America, and Australia.

The primary purpose of a Phase I/II clinical trial is to study safety and to establish a target dosage for further study.

The trial lasts 40-weeks so the last patient should complete their primary end point in March 2015 or thereabouts. Allowing 3-4 months for data analysis and review, there might be some results reported Summer 2015.

Shire is the trial sponsor.

Categories
Advocacy Awareness Policy Research

Rare Disease Advocacy – Behind the Scenes

I ran across this article a few minutes ago. It’s a great insight into the challenges those of us working in rare disease advocacy working encounter.

Every person and agency mentioned in this article is someone we at the MLD Foundation regularly come into contact with as we work on behalf of those with MLD.
http://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/91/19/09119-cover.pdf