“My hope for Brooke is she can one day look back and we have to remind her of the disease she once had.”

That’s Clay Emerson’s biggest hope for his young daughter Brooke, who has cystinosis, a life-threatening genetic disease that appears by the age of two and over time causes damage to many organs, especially the kidneys and eyes but also the liver, muscle, brain, pancreas and other tissues. The Emersons and other families affected by the disease are featured in a recent video produced by the Cystinosis Research Foundation.

I doubt many can watch the seven-minute piece without getting a lump in their throat or watery eyes. One of many heart wrenching scene shows Brooke’s mother, Jill Emerson, preparing a day’s worth of medicine that she administers through a tube connected to Brook’s stomach.

“Brooke takes about 20 doses of medication a day and that’s throughout the 24hr period in a day. The poor kid hasn’t had a full night’s sleep ever in her entire life because I have to wake her up to take her life-saving medicine.”

But these treatments only slow down the progression of this incurable disease. Even perfect compliance with taking the medicine doesn’t stop severe complications of the disease including kidney failure, diabetes, muscle weakness, and difficulty swallowing just to name a few. Cystinosis also shorten life spans. Natalie, the video’s narrator, a young woman with cystinosis wonders how much time she has left:

“There are people in their 20s who have recently died from cystinosis. I am 25 years old and I often think about how long I have to live. I’m praying for a cure for all of us.”

Her prayers may be answered in the form of a stem cell gene therapy treatment. UCSD researcher Dr. Stephanie Cherqui, who is also featured in the video, received $5 million in CIRM funding to bring her team’s therapy to clinical trials in people.

At a cellular level, cystinosis is caused by mutations in a gene called CTNS which lead to an accumulation of the amino acid cysteine. The excess cysteine eventually forms crystals causing devastating damage to cells throughout the body. Cherqui’s treatment strategy is to take blood stem cells from affected individuals, insert a good copy of the CTNS gene using genome editing into the cells’ DNA, and then transplant the cells back into the patient.

Her team has preliminary evidence that the strategy works in mice. Now, they will use the CIRM grant to complete these pre-clinical studies and prepare the genetically engineered blood stem cells for use in patients. These steps are necessary to get the green light from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin clinical trials, hopefully some time this year.

Cherqui says that if all goes well, the treatment approach may have benefits beyond cystinosis:

Stephanie Cherqui

“If we can bring this to the finish line, we can then show the way to maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of other genetic diseases. So this could be a real benefit to mankind.”