Stories about: Manton Center

Newborn DNA sequencing finds actionable disease risks in nearly 10% of enrolled babies

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BabySeq study sequenced the DNA of 159 newborns
(PHOTO: AdobeStock)

Current newborn screening tests a baby’s blood for several dozen known, treatable conditions. Can full-on DNA sequencing at birth add more benefit? Interpreting sequencing results is complex: having a genetic variant doesn’t always mean having the disease, and many of the conditions identified may not currently be treatable.

To explore what DNA sequencing might turn up, the BabySeq study, an NIH-funded project, was in launched in 2015. A team led by Ozge Ceyhan-Birsoy, PhD of Partners HealthCare and Alan H. Beggs, PhD, now reports the comprehensive results of whole-exome sequencing in 159 infants. Their analysis is published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. …

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Genomic sequencing for newborns: Are parents receptive?

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BabySeqCasie Genetti, MS, CGC is a licensed genetic counselor with the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is first author of a recently published paper on the BabySeq Project.

The idea of genomic sequencing for every newborn has many in the scientific community buzzing with excitement, while leaving others wary of the ethical and social implications. But what do the parents think? The BabySeq Project has been exploring parental motivations and concerns while assessing their willingness to participate in a pilot newborn sequencing study. …

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A perfect genetic hit: New gene mutation implicated in rare congenital diarrhea

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Normal intestinal organoids (left) in contrast to intestinal organoids derived from patients (right) with a newly-discovered gene mutation linked to congenital diarrhea.
Normal intestinal organoids (left) in contrast to intestinal organoids derived from patients (right) with a newly-discovered gene mutation linked to congenital diarrhea.

When the 1-year-old boy arrived from overseas, he was relying on total parenteral nutrition — a way of bypassing the digestive system to provide nutrients and calories completely intravenously — to survive. From the time of his birth, he had experienced unexplainable diarrhea. Answers were desperately needed.

Sequencing his genes in search of clues, neonatologists and collaborators at the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Boston Children’s Hospital identified a new gene mutation responsible for chronic congenital diarrhea — even finding a similar mutation in two other children as well.

Using patient-derived intestinal organoids in the laboratory, the team discovered that the newly-identified gene mutation, WNT2B, appears to stifle intestinal stem cells’ normal function and growth. The findings were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

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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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Why do some people with cystic fibrosis live much longer than others?

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Lung tissue, which can be compromised by the genetic disorder known as cystic fibrosis, is seen under microscopic view.
Lung tissue under microscope.

The answer may be hidden in their genes.

Cystic fibrosis is an inherited disorder caused by genetic mutations that disrupt the normal movement of chloride in and out of cells. Among other health problems, cystic fibrosis compromises the lungs’ ability to fight infection and breathe efficiently, making it the most lethal genetic disease in the Caucasian population. Patients have an average lifespan of just 30 to 40 years.

Despite this narrow average lifespan, there is a big range in how severely cystic fibrosis (CF) affects the lungs and other organs depending on an individual’s specific genetic variation, and even in how long patients sharing the same, most common genetic mutation are able to survive with CF.

This led researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital to wonder if other genetic mutations could be protective against CF’s effects. Recent findings published in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology suggest that may be the case. …

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Can rare pain syndromes point the way to new analgesics?

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analgesic drug discovery could reduce prescription opioid use
Boston Children’s Hospital and Amgen will collaborate to discover and accelerate non-addicting pain drugs.

As the opioid epidemic deepens and drug overdoses increase, effective non-addicting painkillers are desperately needed. Efforts to discover new pain pathways to target with new drugs have thus far had little success. Other promising research is investigating triggerable local delivery systems for non-opioid nerve blockers, but it’s still in the early stages.

A new collaboration between Boston Children’s Hospital and the biopharmaceutical company Amgen is aimed at accelerating new pain treatments. Announced yesterday, it will revolve around patients with rare, perplexing pain syndromes. The scientists hope that the genetic variants they find in these patients will shed new light on pain biology and lead to new ways of controlling pain.  …

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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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Solving medical mysteries: The Undiagnosed Disease Network

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Emmie was lucky enough to be diagnosed before age 3, but many families face a much longer journey.
Emmie Mendes was lucky enough to be diagnosed before age 3, but many families face a much longer journey.

At first, Corrie and Adam Mendes thought their daughter Emmie had an inner ear problem. She was late with several early milestones, including walking, and when she did walk, she often lost her balance. The family pediatrician sent them to a neurologist, who ordered a brain MRI and diagnosed her with pachygyria, a rare condition in which the brain is smoother than normal, lacking its usual number of folds.

Additionally, Emmie’s ventricles, the fluid-filled cushions around the brain, looked enlarged, so the neurologist recommended brain surgery to install a shunt to drain off fluid. He advised Corrie and Adam that Emmie’s life expectancy would be greatly reduced.

As Corrie recounts on her blog, Emmie’s Story, she went online and came across the research laboratory of Christopher Walsh, MD, PhD, at Boston Children’s Hospital. The lab does research on brain malformations and has an affiliated Brain Development and Genetics Clinic that can provide medical care.

After Walsh’s team reviewed Emmie’s MRI scan, genetic counselor Brenda Barry invited the family up from Florida. …

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Restoring muscle function in a rare, devastating disease: Part 2

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Joshua Frase, who died from myotubular myopathy in 2006
Joshua Frase, who died from X-linked MTM, with his father in 2006.

Part 2 of a two-part series. (Read part 1.)

Back in the 1990s, rheumatologist Richard Weisbart, MD, of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was studying lupus in a mouse model and found that the mice were making an antibody that had the intriguing ability to get inside tissues and cells.

Weisbart shifted his work away from studying lupus to studying and refining the antibody, called 3E10, and he and others showed that proteins could be delivered into different tissues of the body simply by attaching them to a fragment of 3E10.

Dustin Armstrong, PhD, a postdoc at Novartis at the time, was trying to find molecules that could activate growth in weakened muscles—without activating possibly cancerous growth in other tissues. He saw Weisbart’s work and contacted UCLA. In 2008, he obtained seed money and founded a company around 3E10-based therapeutics for muscular diseases, now known as Valerion Therapeutics (formerly 4s3 Bioscience).

“There’s a huge need for therapies for genetic muscle diseases, and muscle was a tissue we could target well with our technology,” says Armstrong. …

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Restoring muscle function in a rare, devastating disease: Part 1

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A boy with X-linked myotubular myopathy
Will Ward at the NSTAR Walk for Boston Children’s Hospital in 2012.

This two-part series examines two potential treatment approaches for myotubular myopathy, a genetic disorder that causes muscle weakness from birth.

Sixth-grader William Ward cruises the hallways at school with a thumb-driven power chair and participates in class with the help of a DynaVox speech device. Although born with a rare, muscle-weakening disease called X-linked myotubular myopathy, or MTM, leaving him virtually immobile, he hasn’t given up.

Neither has Alan Beggs, PhD, who directs the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Boston Children’s Hospital, and who has known Will since he was a newborn in intensive care.

“From the very beginning, Alan connected with our family in a very human way,” says Will’s mother, Erin Ward. “In the scientific community, he’s been the bridge and the connector of researchers around the world. That makes him unique.”

Since the 1990s, Beggs has enrolled more than 500 patients with congenital myopathies from all over the world in genetic studies, seeking causes and potential treatments for congenital myopathies—rare, often fatal diseases that weaken children’s skeletal muscles from birth, often requiring them to breathe on a ventilator and to receive food through a gastrostomy tube. …

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