Stories about: gene therapy

Putting patients first in the translational research pipeline

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During a follow-up visit, pediatric hematologist/oncologist Sung-Yun Pai, MD, hugs a patient who received gene therapy for X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency.
During a follow-up visit at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, pediatric hematologist/oncologist Sung-Yun Pai, MD, hugs a patient who received gene therapy for X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency.

This is part II of a two-part blog series recapping the 2018 BIO International Convention. Read part I: Forecasting the convergence of artificial intelligence and precision medicine.

The hope to improve people’s lives is what drives many members of industry and academia to bring new products and therapies to market. At the BIO International Convention last week in Boston, there was lots of discussion about how translational science intersects with patients’ needs and why the best therapeutic developmental pipelines are consistently putting patients first.

As a case in point, Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD, of Boston Children’s discussed his work to improve testing and translation of new therapies for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As a member of PACT (Preclinical Autism Consortium for Therapeutics) and director of Boston Children’s Translational Neuroscience Program, Sahin aims to bridge the gap between drug discovery and clinical translation.

“Our mission is to de-risk entry of new therapies in the ASD drug discovery and development space,” said Sahin, who is also a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

One big challenge, says Sahin, is knowing how well — or how poorly — autism therapies are actually affecting people with ASD. Externally, ASD is recognized by its core symptoms of repetitive behaviors and social deficits. …

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A bold strategy to enhance CAR T-cell therapies, capable of targeting DIPG and other tough-to-treat cancers

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CAR T-cell therapy uses a patient's own genetically modified T cells to attack cancer, as pictured here, where T cells surround a cancer cell.
T cells surround a cancer cell. Credit: National Institutes of Health

A Boston-based team of researchers, made up of scientists and pediatric oncologists, believe a better CAR T-cell therapy is on the horizon.

They say it could treat a range of cancers — including the notorious, universally-fatal childhood brain cancer known as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma or DIPG — by targeting tumor cells in an exclusive manner that reduces life-threatening side effects (such as off-target toxicities and cytokine release syndrome). The team, led by Carl Novina, MD, PhD, and Mark Kieran, MD, PhD, of the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, calls their approach “small molecule CAR T-cell therapy.”

Their plan is to optimize the ability for CAR T-cell therapies, which use a patient’s genetically modified T cells to combat cancer, to more specifically kill tumor cells without setting off an immune response “storm” known as cytokine release syndrome. The key ingredient is a unique small molecule that greatly enhances the specificity of the tumor targeting component of the therapy. …

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Snaps from the lab: From gene discovery to gene therapy for one rare disease

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Will Ward’s birthday falls on Rare Disease Day (Feb. 28). That’s an interesting coincidence because he has a rare disease: X-linked myotubular myopathy (MTM), a rare, muscle-weakening disease that affects only boys. Originally on Snapchat, this video captures the Ward family’s recent visit to the lab of Alan Beggs, PhD to learn more about MTM research.

Beggs, director of the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Boston Children’s Hospital, has known Will since he was a newborn in intensive care. In this lab walk-though you’ll see a freezer filled with muscle samples, stored in liquid nitrogen; muscle tissue under a microscope; gene sequencing to identify mutations causing MTM and other congenital myopathies and a testing station to measure muscle function in samples taken from animal models.

Beggs’s work, which began more than 20 years ago, led to pivotal studies in male Labrador retrievers who happen to have the same mutation and are born with a canine form of MTM. By adding back a healthy copy of the gene, Beggs’s collaborators got the dogs back on their feet running around again. (Read about Nibs, a female MTM carrier whose descendants took part in these studies.)

Based on the canine results, a clinical trial is now testing gene therapy in boys under the age of 5 with MTM. The phase I/II trial aims to enroll 12 boys and measure their respiratory and motor function and muscle structure after being dosed with a vector carrying a corrected MTM gene. In the meantime, observational and retrospective studies are characterizing the natural history of boys with MTM.

Learn more about the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research.

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Sickle cell gene therapy to boost fetal hemoglobin: A 70-year timeline of discovery

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sickled cells occluding a blood vessel
Sickled cells occluding a blood vessel. (Image: Elena Hartley)

Boston Children’s Hospital is now enrolling patients age 3 to 35 in a clinical trial of gene therapy for sickle cell disease. Based on technology developed its own labs, it differs from other gene therapy approaches by having a two-pronged action. It represses production of the mutated beta hemoglobin that causes red blood cells to form the stiff “sickle” shapes that block up blood vessels. It also increases production of the fetal form of hemoglobin, which people normally stop making after birth.

Fetal hemoglobin doesn’t sickle and works fine for oxygen transport. The gene therapy being tested now restores fetal hemoglobin production by turning “off” a silencing gene called BCH11A.

“BCL11A represses fetal hemoglobin and also activates beta hemoglobin, which is affected by the sickle-cell mutation,” David Williams, MD, the trial’s principal investigator, told Vector last year. Williams is also president of the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. “So when you knock BCL11A down, you simultaneously increase fetal hemoglobin and repress sickling hemoglobin, which is why we think this is the best approach to gene therapy in this disease.”

The therapy is the product of multiple discoveries, the first dating back 70 years. Click selected images below to enlarge. …

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2017 pediatric biomedical advances at Boston Children’s Hospital: Our top 10 picks

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New tools and technologies fueled biomedicine to great heights in 2017. Here are just a few of our top picks. All are great examples of research informing better care for children (and adults).

1. Gene therapy arrives

(Katherine C. Cohen)

In 2017, gene therapy solidly shed the stigma of Jesse Gelsinger’s 1999 death with the development of safer protocols and delivery vectors. Though each disease must navigate its own technical and regulatory path to gene therapy, the number of clinical trials is mounting worldwide, with seven gene therapy trials now recruiting at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. In August, the first gene therapy won FDA approval: CAR T-cell therapy for pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia. …

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Routing gene therapy directly into the brain

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Image of mouse brain that received a transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells. The image shows the transplanted cells (green) rapidly engrafted and gave rise to new cells (also green) that have widely distributed throughout the entire brain. 
Image of a mouse brain that received a direct transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells. The image reveals the transplanted cells (green) rapidly engrafted and gave rise to new cells (also green) that have widely distributed throughout the entire brain.

A therapeutic technique to transplant blood-forming (hematopoietic) stem cells directly into the brain could herald a revolution in our approach to treating central nervous system diseases and neurodegenerative disorders.

The technique, which could be used to transplant donor-matched hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) or a patient’s own genetically-engineered HSCs into the brain, was reported in Science Advances today by researchers from the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy.

In their study, the team tested the technique in a mouse model to treat lysosomal storage disorders, a group of severe metabolic disorders that affect the central nervous system.

The team’s findings are groundbreaking because, until now, it was thought that HSCs — from a healthy, matched donor or a patient’s own genetically-corrected cells — needed to be transplanted indirectly …

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Gene therapy halts progression of cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy in clinical trial

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David Williams, MD, the principal investigator of the clinical trial, discusses gene therapy and its impact on children with adrenoleukodystrophy

Adrenoleukodystrophy — depicted in the 1992 movie “Lorenzo’s Oil” — is a genetic disease that most severely affects boys. Caused by a defective gene on the X chromosome, it triggers a build-up of fatty acids that damage the protective myelin sheaths of the brain’s neurons, leading to cognitive and motor impairment. The most devastating form of the disease is cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (CALD), marked by loss of myelin and brain inflammation. Without treatment, CALD ultimately leads to a vegetative state, typically claiming boys’ lives within 10 years of diagnosis.

But now, a breakthrough treatment is offering hope to families affected by adrenoleukodystrophy. A gene therapy treatment effectively stabilized CALD’s progression in 88 percent of patients, according to clinical trial results reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study was led by researchers from the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and Massachusetts General Hospital. …

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New hope for X-linked myotubular myopathy as gene therapy clinical trial begins

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gene therapy myotubular myopathy

Boys born with X-linked myotubular myopathy (XLMTM) face a grim prognosis. Extreme muscle weakness leaves many ventilator-dependent from birth, and most infants need feeding tubes. About half pass away before 18 months of age.

Last week, the biotechnology company Audentes Therapeutics announced the dosing of the first patient in a gene-therapy clinical trial — 21 years after the MTM1 gene was first cloned.

Hopes are high. Gene therapy has already shown striking benefits in dogs with XLMTM in studies co-authored by Alan Beggs, PhD, director of the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Boston Children’s Hospital, and colleagues at Généthon and the University of Washington. In the most recent study, 10-week-old Labrador retrievers already showing signs of the disease showed improvements in breathing, limb strength and walking gait after a single dose of the gene therapy vector. …

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Landmark moment for science as the FDA approves a gene therapy for the first time

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Leukemia blast cells, which could now be destroyed using a first-of-its-kind, FDA-approved gene therapy called CAR-T cell therapy
Leukemia blast cells.

Today, the Food and Drug Administration approved a gene therapy known as CAR T-cell therapy that genetically modifies a patient’s own cells to help them combat pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood cancer. It is the first gene therapy to be approved by the FDA.

“This represents the progression of the field of gene therapy, which has been developing over the last 30 years,” says gene therapy pioneer David A. Williams, MD, who is chief scientific officer of Boston Children’s Hospital and president of the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. “It’s a realization of what we envisioned to be molecular medicine when this research started. The vision — that we could alter cells in a way to cure disease — is now coming true.” …

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Gene therapy: The promise, the reality, the future

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gene therapy
(Graphs courtesy Alexandra Biffi, Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center)

Gene therapy stalled in the early 2000s as adverse effects came to light in European trials (leukemias triggered by the gene delivery vector) and following the 1999 death of U.S. patient Jesse Gelsinger. But after 30 years of development, and with the advent of safer vectors, gene therapy is becoming a clinical reality. It falls into two main categories:

  • In vivo: Direct injection of the gene therapy vector, carrying the desired gene, into the bloodstream or target organ.
  • Ex vivo: Removal of a patient’s cells, treating the cells with gene therapy, and reinfusing them back into the patient, as in hematopoietic stem cell transplant and CAR T-cell therapy.

A recent panel at Boston Children’s Hospital, hosted by the hospital’s Technology and Innovation Development Office (TIDO), explored where gene therapy is and where it’s going. Here were the key takeaways: …

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