The future looks brighter for cystinosis patients and their families.
As one of 7,000 rare diseases, cystinosis causes an abnormal build-up of the amino acid cystine that can lead to organ failure and premature death. With little to no treatment options, children and young adults primarily affected by the condition often have a poor prognosis – until now.
Thanks to $17 million in early funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and the unwavering dedication of researchers like Dr. Stephanie Cherqui at UC San Diego (UCSD), a gene therapy to address the genetic defects of cystinosis is making its way through the field.
Last month, Novartis, a pharmaceutical company with extensive expertise in clinical-stage gene therapy and access to infrastructure, purchased the gene therapy for $87.5 million from AVROBIO. CIRM funded the preclinical work for this study, which involved completing the testing needed to apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as well as a subsequent clinical trial.
“CIRM played a significant role in advancing the stem cell gene therapy program for cystinosis from bed-to-bedside. Through its funding and support, CIRM has allowed me to perform the pre-clinical studies required for an investigational new drug application, and then to conduct the first phase of the clinical trial in an academic setting,” said Dr. Cherqui.
Not only will the Novartis acquisition expedite the global availability of this therapy for people with cystinosis, but it also affirms CIRM’s pivotal role in the development of early-stage research that can turn into tangible treatments.
“The Novartis acquisition has the potential to accelerate clinical development of novel hematopoietic gene therapy for cystinosis patients. We’re excited for the cystinosis patient community as well as the UCSD, UCLA and AVROBIO teams that led this advancement,” said Dr. Shyam Patel, Senior Director of Business Development and Alliance Management at CIRM. “Furthermore, the Novartis acquisition validates CIRM’s Clinical funding model, which has supported this program since 2016 through preclinical studies as well as through the ongoing first-in-human clinical trial that was coordinated through the UCSD CIRM Alpha Clinic.”
The impact of this acquisition goes far beyond the walls of research laboratories. For those with cystinosis, it brings a renewed sense of hope and possibility.
In October 2019, 20-year-old Jordan Janz became the first person in the world to receive an experimental therapy for cystinosis. Cystinosis is a rare genetic disorder characterized by the accumulation of an amino acid called cystine in different tissues and organs of the body including the kidneys, eyes, muscles, liver, pancreas, and brain. This accumulation of cystine ultimately leads to multi-organ failure, eventually causing premature death in early adulthood. On average, cystinosis patients live to 28.5 years old. By that calculation, Janz didn’t have a lot of time.
The treatment was grueling but worth it. The experimental gene therapy –funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine– seemed to work and Janz began to feel better. There was, however, an unexpected change. Janz’s almost white, blonde hair had settled into a darker tone. Of all the things the gene therapy was expected to alter –such as the severity of his cystinosis symptoms– hair color was not one of them. Eventually, the same phenomenon played out in other people: So far in the gene-therapy trial, four of the five patients –all of whom are white– have gotten darker hair.
The outcome, while surprising to researchers, didn’t seem to be a sign of something going awry, instead they determined that it might be a very visible sign of the gene therapy working.
The sudden hair-color changes were surprising to Stephanie Cherqui, a stem-cell scientist at UC San Diego and the principal investigator of the gene-therapy trial. However, it didn’t seem to be a sign of something going awry, instead Cherqui and her colleagues determined that it might be a very visible sign of the gene therapy working.
But exactly how did genetically modifying Janz’s (and other participants’) blood cells change his hair color? In this instance, scientists chose to genetically tweak blood stem cells because they have a special ability: Some eventually become white blood cells, which then travel to all different parts of the body.
Janz’s new white blood cells were genetically modified to express the gene that is mutated in cystinosis, called CTNS. Once they traveled to his eyes, skin, and gut, the white blood cells began pumping out the missing protein encoded by the gene. Cells in the area began taking up the protein and clearing away long accumulated cystine crystals. In Janz, the anti-cystine proteins from his modified blood cells must have reached the hair follicles in his skin. There, they cleared out the excess cystine that was blocking normal melanin production, and his hair got darker.
Hair color is one way in which patients in the clinical trial are teaching scientists about the full scope of the CTNS gene. The investigators have since added hair biopsies to the trial in order to track the color changes in a more systematic fashion.
It’s hard to think of something as being rare when it affects up to 30 million Americans and 300 million people worldwide. But the truth is there are more than 6,000 conditions – those affecting 200,000 people or fewer – that are considered rare.
Today, February 28th, is Rare Disease Day. It’s a day to remind ourselves of the millions of people, and their families, struggling with these diseases. These conditions are also called or orphan diseases because, in many cases, drug companies were not interested in adopting them to develop treatments.
At the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), we have no such reservations. In fact last Friday our governing Board voted to invest almost $12 million to support a clinical trial for IPEX syndrome. IPEX syndrome is a condition where the body can’t control or restrain an immune response, so the person’s immune cells attack their own healthy tissue. This leads to the development of Type 1 diabetes, severe eczema, damage to the small intestines and kidneys and failure to thrive. It’s diagnosed in infancy, most of those affected are boys, and it is often fatal.
Taylor Lookofsky (who has IPEX syndrome) and his father Brian
IPEX is one of two dozen rare diseases that CIRM is funding a clinical trial for. In fact, more than one third of all the projects we fund target a rare disease or condition. Those include:
Some might question the wisdom of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in conditions that affect a relatively small number of patients. But if you see the faces of these patients and get to know their families, as we do, you know that often agencies like CIRM are their only hope.
Dr. Maria Millan, CIRM’s President and CEO, says the benefits of one successful approach can often extend far beyond one rare disease.
“Children with IPEX syndrome clearly represent a group of patients with an unmet medical need, and this therapy could make a huge difference in their lives. Success of this treatment in this rare disease presents far-reaching potential to develop treatments for a larger number of patients with a broad array of immune disorders.”
CIRM is proud to fund and spread awareness of rare diseases and invites you to watch this video about how they affect families around the world.
COVID-19 and social and racial injustice are two of the biggest challenges facing the US right now. This Thursday, October 8th, we are holding a conversation that explores finding answers to both.
The CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinic Network Symposium is going to feature presentations about advances in stem cell and regenerative research, highlighting treatments that are already in the clinic and being offered to patients.
But we’re also going to dive a little deeper into the work we support, and use it to discuss two of the most pressing issues of the day.
One of the topics being featured is research into COVID-19. To date CIRM has funded 17 different projects, including three clinical trials. We’ll talk about how these are trying to find ways to help people infected with the virus, seeing if stem cells can help restore function to organs and tissues damaged by the virus, and if we can use stem cells to help develop safe and effective vaccines.
Immediately after that we are going to use COVID-19 as a way of exploring how the people most at risk of being infected and suffering serious consequences, are also the ones most likely to be left out of the research and have most trouble accessing treatments and vaccines.
Study after study highlights how racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in clinical trials and disproportionately affected by debilitating diseases. We have a responsibility to change that, to ensure that the underserved are given the same opportunity to take part in clinical trials as other communities.
How do we do that, how do we change a system that has resisted change for so long, how do we overcome the mistrust that has built up in underserved communities following decades of abuse? We’ll be talking about with experts who are on the front lines of this movement.
It promises to be a lively meeting. We’d love to see you there. It’s virtual – of course – it’s open to everyone, and it’s free.
One of our favorite things to do at CIRM is deliver exciting news about CIRM projects. This usually entails discussion of recent discoveries that made headlines, or announcing the launch of a new CIRM-funded clinical trial …. tangible signs of progress towards addressing unmet medical needs through advances in stem technology.
But there are equally exciting signs of progress that are not always so obvious to the untrained eye- those that we are privileged to witness behind the scenes at CIRM. These efforts don’t always lead to a splashy news article or even to a scientific publication, but they nonetheless drive the evolution of new ideas and can help steer the field away from futile lines of investigation. Dozens of such projects are navigating uncharted waters by filling knowledge gaps, breaking down technical barriers, and working closely with regulatory agencies to define novel and safe paths to the clinic.
These efforts can remain “hidden” because they are in the intermediate stages of the long, arduous and expensive journey from “bench to beside”. For the pioneering projects that CIRM funds, this journey is unique and untrod, and can be fraught with false starts. But CIRM has developed tools to track the momentum of these programs and provide continuous support for those with the most promise. In so doing, we have watched projects evolve as they wend their way to the clinic. We wanted to share a few examples of how we do this with our readers, but first… a little background for our friends who are unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of inventing new medicines.
A common metaphor for bringing scientific discoveries to market is a pipeline, which begins in a laboratory where a discovery occurs, and ends with government approval to commercialize a new medicine, after it is proven to be safe and effective. In between discovery and approval is a stage called “Translation”, where investigators develop ways to transition their “research level” processes to “clinically compatible” ones, which only utilize substances that are of certified quality for human use.
Investigators must also work out novel ways to manufacture the product at larger scale and transition the methods used for testing in animal models to those that can be implemented in human subjects.
A key milestone in Translation is the “preIND” (pre Investigational New Drug (IND) meeting, where an investigator presents data and plans to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for feedback before next stage of development begins, the pivotal testing needed to show it is both safe and effective.
These “IND enabling studies” are rigorous but necessary to support an application for an IND and the initiation of clinical trials, beginning with phase 1 to assess safety in a small number of individuals, and phase 2, where an expanded group is evaluated to see if the therapy has any benefits for the patient. Phase 3 trials are studies of very large numbers of individuals to gain definitive evidence of safety and therapeutic effect, generally the last step before applying to the FDA for market approval. An image of the pipeline and the stages described are provided in our diagram below.
The pipeline can be notoriously long and tricky, with plenty of twists, turns, and unexpected obstacles along the way. Many more projects enter than emerge from this gauntlet, but as we see from these examples of ‘works in progress”, there is a lot of momentum building.
Caption for Graphic:This graphic shows the number of CIRM-funded projects and the stages they have progressed through multiple rounds of CIRM funding. For example, the topmost arrow shows that are about 19 projects at the translational stage of the pipeline that received earlier support through one of CIRM’s Discovery stage programs. Many of these efforts came out of our pre-2016 funding initiatives such as Early Translation, Basic Biology and New Faculty Awards. In another example, you can see that about 15 awards that were first funded by CIRM at the IND enabling stage have since progressed into a phase 1 or phase 2 clinical trials. While most of these efforts also originated in some of CIRM’s pre-2016 initiatives such as the Disease Team Awards, others have already progressed from CIRM’s newer programs that were launched as part of the “2.0” overhaul in 2016 (CLIN1).
The number of CIRM projects that have evolved and made their way down the pipeline with CIRM support is impressive, but it is clearly an under-representation, as there are other projects that have progressed outside of CIRM’s purview, which can make things trickier to verify.
We also track projects that have spun off or been licensed to commercial organizations, another very exciting form of “progression”. Perhaps those will contribute to another blog for another day! In the meantime, here are a just a few examples of some of the progressors that are depicted on the graphic.
Project: stem cell therapy to enhance bone healing in theelderly
– Currently funded stage: IND enabling development, CLIN1-11256 (Dr. Zhu, Ankasa Regenerative Therapeutics)
Every so often you hear a story and your first reaction is “oh, I have to share this with someone, anyone, everyone.” That’s what happened to me the other day.
I was talking with Kristin MacDonald, an amazing woman, a fierce patient advocate and someone who took part in a CIRM-funded clinical trial to treat retinitis pigmentosa (RP). The disease had destroyed Kristin’s vision and she was hoping the therapy, pioneered by jCyte, would help her. Kristin, being a bit of a pioneer herself, was the first person to test the therapy in the U.S.
Anyway, Kristin was doing a Zoom presentation and wanted to look her best so she asked a friend to come over and do her hair and makeup. The woman she asked, was Rosie Barrero, another patient in that RP clinical trial. Not so very long ago Rosie was legally blind. Now, here she was helping do her friend’s hair and makeup. And doing it beautifully too.
That’s when you know the treatment works. At least for Rosie.
There are many other stories to be heard – from patients and patient advocates, from researchers who develop therapies to the doctors who deliver them. – at our CIRM 2020 Grantee Meeting on next Monday September 14th Tuesday & September 15th.
It’s two full days of presentations and discussions on everything from heart disease and cancer, to COVID-19, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and spina bifida. Here’s a link to the Eventbrite page where you can find out more about the event and also register to be part of it.
Like pretty much everything these days it’s a virtual event so you’ll be able to join in from the comfort of your kitchen, living room, even the backyard.
And it’s free!
You can join us for all two days or just one session on one day. The choice is yours. And feel free to tell your friends or anyone else you think might be interested.
It’s been a long time coming. Eighteen months to be precise. Which is a peculiarly long time for an Annual Report. The world is certainly a very different place today than when we started, and yet our core mission hasn’t changed at all, except to spring into action to make our own contribution to fighting the coronavirus.
This latest CIRM Annual Reportcovers 2019 through June 30, 2020. Why? Well, as you probably know we are running out of money and could be funding our last new awards by the end of this year. So, we wanted to produce as complete a picture of our achievements as we could – keeping in mind that we might not be around to produce a report next year.
Dr. Catriona Jamieson, UC San Diego physician and researcher
It’s a pretty jam-packed report. It covers everything from the 14 new clinical trials we have funded this year, including three specifically focused on COVID-19. It looks at the extraordinary researchers that we fund and the progress they have made, and the billions of additional dollars our funding has helped leverage for California. But at the heart of it, and at the heart of everything we do, are the patients. They’re the reason we are here. They are the reason we do what we do.
Byron Jenkins, former Naval fighter pilot who battled back from his own fight with multiple myeloma
There are stories of people like Byron Jenkins who almost died from multiple myeloma but is now back leading a full, active life with his family thanks to a CIRM-funded therapy with Poseida. There is Jordan Janz, a young man who once depended on taking 56 pills a day to keep his rare disease, cystinosis, under control but is now hoping a stem cell therapy developed by Dr. Stephanie Cherqui and her team at UC San Diego will make that something of the past.
Jordan Janz and Dr. Stephanie Cherqui
These individuals are remarkable on so many levels, not the least because they were willing to be among the first people ever to try these therapies. They are pioneers in every sense of the word.
Sneha Santosh, former CIRM Bridges student and now a researcher with Novo Nordisk
There is a lot of information in the report, charting the work we have done over the last 18 months. But it’s also a celebration of everyone who made it possible, and our way of saying thank you to the people of California who gave us this incredible honor and opportunity to do this work.
Last week saw a flurry of really encouraging reports from projects that CIRM has supported. We blogged about two of them last Wednesday, but here’s another two programs showing promising results.
UC San Diego researcher Dr. Stephanie Cherqui is running a CIRM-funded clinical trial for cystinosis. This is a condition where patients lack the ability to clear an amino acid called cystine from their cells. As the cystine builds up it can lead to multi-organ failure affecting the kidneys, eyes, thyroid, muscle, and pancreas.
Dr. Cherqui uses the patient’s own blood stem cells, that have been genetically corrected in the lab to remove the defective gene that causes the problem. It’s hoped these new cells will help reduce the cystine buildup.
The data presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Cell and Gene Therapy (ASCGT) focused on the first patient treated with this approach. Six months after being treated the patient is showing positive trends in kidney function. His glomerular filtration rate (a measure of how well the kidneys are working) has risen from 38 (considered a sign of moderate to severe loss of kidney function) to 52 (mild loss of kidney function). In addition, he has not had to take the medication he previously needed to control the disorder, nor has he experienced any serious side effects from the therapy.
Capricor Therapeutics also had some positive news about its therapy for people with Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). This is a progressive genetic disorder that slowly destroys the muscles. It affects mostly boys. By their teens many are unable to walk, and most die of heart or lung failure in their 20’s.
Capricor is using a therapy called CAP-1002, using cells derived from heart stem cells, in the HOPE-2 clinical trial.
In a news release Capricor said 12-month data from the trial showed improvements in heart function, lung function and upper body strength. In contrast, a placebo control group that didn’t get the CAP-1002 treatment saw their condition deteriorate.
Craig McDonald, M.D., the lead investigator on the study, says these results are really encouraging. “I am incredibly pleased with the outcome of the HOPE-2 trial which demonstrated clinically relevant benefits of CAP-1002 which resulted in measurable improvements in upper limb, cardiac and respiratory function. This is the first clinical trial which shows benefit to patients in advanced stages of DMD for which treatment options are limited.”
Orphan drug designation is a special status given by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for potential treatments of rare diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 in the U.S. This type of status can significantly help advance treatments for rare diseases by providing financial incentives in the form of tax credits towards the cost of clinical trials and prescription drug user fee waivers.
Fortunately for us, a stem cell-gene therapy approach used in a CIRM-funded clinical trial for Cystinosis has just received orphan drug designation. The trial is being conducted by Dr. Stephanie Cherqui at UC San Diego, which is an academic collaborator for AVROBIO, Inc.
Cystinosis is a rare disease that primarily affects children and young adults, and leads to premature death, usually in early adulthood. Patients inherit defective copies of a gene called CTNS, which results in abnormal accumulation of an amino acid called cystine in all cells of the body. This buildup of cystine can lead to multi-organ failure, with some of earliest and most pronounced effects on the kidneys, eyes, thyroid, muscle, and pancreas. Many patients suffer end-stage kidney failure and severe vision defects in childhood, and as they get older, they are at increased risk for heart disease, diabetes, bone defects, and neuromuscular defects.
Dr. Cherqui’s clinical trial uses a gene therapy approach to modify a patient’s own blood stem cells with a functional version of the defective CTNS gene. The goal of this treatment is to reintroduce the corrected stem cells into the patient to give rise to blood cells that will reduce cystine buildup in affected tissues.
In an earlier blog, we shared a story by UCSD news that featured Jordan Janz, the first patient to participate in this trial, as well as the challenges promising approaches like this one face in terms of getting financial support. Our hope is that in addition to the funding we have provided, this special designation gives additional support to what appears to be a very promising treatment for a very rare disease.
You can read the official press release from AVROBIO, Inc. related to the orphan drug designation status here.
CIRM funds a lot of research and all of it has life-saving potential. But every once in a while you come across a story about someone benefiting from CIRM-supported research that highlights why the work we do is so important. This story is about a brilliant researcher at UC San Diego developing a treatment for a really rare disease, one that was unlikely to get funding from a big pharmaceutical company because it offered little chance for a return on its investment. At CIRM we don’t have to worry about things like that. Stories like this are our return on investment.
Our thanks to our colleagues at UCSD News for allowing us to run this piece in full.
Jordan Janz and Dr. Stephanie Cherqui in her lab at the UC San Diego School of Medicine: Photo courtesy UC San Diego
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By Heather Buschman, PhD
Born with a rare disease called cystinosis, 20-year-old Jordan Janz arrived at a crossroads: continue life as-is, toward a future most likely leading to kidney failure and an early death or become the first patient in the world to undergo a new gene-and-stem cell therapy developed over more than a decade by UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers
For the majority of Jordan Janz’s 20 years of life, most neighbors in his tiny Canadian town never knew he was sick. Janz snowboarded, hunted and fished. He hung with friends, often playing ice hockey video games. He worked in shipping and receiving for a company that makes oil pumps.
But there were times when Janz was younger that he vomited up to 13 times each day. He received a growth hormone injection every day for six years. He needed to swallow 56 pills every day just to manage his symptoms. And the medication required around-the-clock administration, which meant his mother or another family member had to get up with him every night.
“I was tired for school every day,” Janz said. “I was held back in second grade because I missed so much school. And because the medication had a bad odor to it, when I did go to school kids would ask, ‘What’s that smell?’ It was hard.”
Janz was born with cystinosis, a rare metabolic disorder that’s detected in approximately one in 100,000 live births worldwide. People with cystinosis inherit a mutation in the gene that encodes a protein called cystinosin. Cystinosin normally helps cells transport the amino acid cystine. Because cells in people with cystinosis don’t produce the cystinosin protein, cystine accumulates. Over the years, cystine crystals build up and begin to damage tissues and organs, from the kidneys and liver to muscles, eyes and brain. Numerous symptoms and adverse consequences result.
These days, Janz manages his condition. There’s a time-release version of the symptom-relieving medication now that allows him to go 12 hours between doses, allowing for a good night’s sleep. But there’s no stopping the relentless accumulation of cystine crystals, no cure for cystinosis.
In October 2019, Janz became the first patient to receive treatment as part of a Phase I/II clinical trial to test the safety and efficacy of a unique gene therapy approach to treating cystinosis. The treatment was developed over more than a decade of research by Stephanie Cherqui, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics, and her team at University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
“The day they started looking for people for the trial, my mom picked up the phone, found a number for Dr. Cherqui, called her and put my name in as a candidate,” Janz said.
Janz’s mom, Barb Kulyk, has long followed Cherqui’s work. Like many parents of children with cystinosis, Kulyk has attended conferences, read up on research and met many other families, doctors and scientists working on the condition. Kulyk says she trusts Cherqui completely. But she was understandably nervous for her son to be the first person ever to undergo a completely new therapy.
“It’s like giving birth,” she said shortly before Janz received his gene therapy. “You’re really looking forward to the outcome, but dreading the process.”
The treatment
Cherqui’s gene therapy approach involves genetical modifying the patient’s own stem cells. To do this, her team obtained hematopoietic stem cells from Janz’s bone marrow. These stem cells are the precursors to all blood cells, including both red blood cells and immune cells. The scientists then re-engineered Janz’s stem cells in a lab using gene therapy techniques to introduce a normal version of the cystinosin gene. Lastly, they reinfused Janz with his own now-cystinosin-producing cells. The approach is akin to a bone marrow transplant — the patient is both donor and recipient.
“A bone marrow transplant can be very risky, especially when you take hematopoietic stem cells from a another person. In that case, there’s always the chance the donor’s immune cells will attack the recipient’s organs, so-called graft-versus-host disease,” Cherqui explained. “It’s a great advantage to use the patient’s own stem cells.”
As is the case for other bone marrow transplants, Janz’s gene-modified stem cells are expected to embed themselves in his bone marrow, where they should divide and differentiate to all types of blood cells. Those cells are then expected to circulate throughout his body and embed in his tissues and organs, where they should produce the normal cystinosin protein. Based on Cherqui’s preclinical data, she expects the cystinosin protein will be transferred to the surrounding diseased cells. At that point, Janz’s cells should finally be able to appropriately transport cystine for disposal — potentially alleviating his symptoms.
Before receiving his modified stem cells, Janz had to undergo chemotherapy to make space in his bone marrow for the new cells. Not unexpectedly, Janz experienced a handful of temporary chemotherapy-associated side-effects, including immune suppression, hair loss and fatigue. He also had mucositis, an inflammation of mucous membranes lining the digestive tract, which meant he couldn’t talk or eat much for a few days.
Now, only three months after his transfusion of engineered stem cells, Cherqui reports that Janz is making a good recovery, though it’s still too early to see a decrease in his cystinosis-related symptoms.
“I’ve been sleeping at least 10 hours a day for the last few weeks,” Janz said. “It’s crazy, but I know my body is just working hard to, I guess, create a new ‘me.’ So it’s no wonder I’m tired. But I’m feeling okay overall.
“One of the hardest parts for me is being inactive for so long. I’m not used to doing nothing all day. But I’m taking an online course while I wait for my immune system to rebuild. And I’m getting pretty good at video games.”
Like all Phase I/II clinical trials, the current study is designed to first test the safety and tolerability of the new treatment. Janz knows the treatment might not necessarily help him.
“When we started this trial, my mom explained it like this: ‘We have a tornado at the front door and a tsunami at the back door, and we have to pick one to go through. Neither will be any fun and we don’t know what’s going to happen, but you have to believe you will make it and go.
“So we weighed the pros and cons and, basically, if I don’t do this trial now, when I’m older I might not be healthy and strong enough for it. So I decided to go for it because, even if there are consequences from the chemotherapy, if it works I could live 20 years longer than I’m supposed to and be healthy for the rest of my life. That’s worth it.”
Besides the possible benefit to himself, Janz also sees his participation in the clinical trial as a way to contribute to the tight-knit community of families with children who have cystinosis.
“I’m willing to do if it helps the kids,” he said. “Somebody has to do it. I don’t have the money to donate to scientific conferences and stuff like that, but I can do this trial.”
The trial
If the treatment continues to meet certain criteria for safety and efficacy for Janz and one other participant after three months, two more adult participants will be enrolled. Three months after that, if the treatment continues to be safe and effective, the trial might enroll two adolescent participants. To participate in the clinical trial, individuals must meet specific eligibility requirements.
Later in the trial, Cherqui and team will begin measuring how well the treatment actually works. The specific objectives include assessing the degree to which gene-modified stem cells establish themselves in bone marrow, how they affect cystine levels and cystine crystal counts in blood and tissues.
“This trial is the first to use gene-modified hematopoietic stem cell gene therapy to treat a multi-organ degenerative disorder for which the protein is anchored in the membrane of the lysosomes, as opposed to secreted enzymes,” Cherqui said. “We were amazed when we tested this approach in the mouse model of cystinosis — autologous stem cell transplantation reversed the disease. The tissues remained healthy, even the kidneys and the eyes.”
Trial participants are closely monitored for the first 100 days after treatment, then tested again at six, nine, 12, 18 and 24 months post-gene therapy for a variety of factors, including vital signs, cystine levels in a number of organs, kidney function, hormone function and physical well-being.
“If successful in clinical trials, this approach could provide a one-time, lifelong therapy that may prevent the need for kidney transplantation and long-term complications caused by cystine buildup,” Cherqui said.
The future
For the trial participants, all of the pre-treatment tests, the treatment itself, and monitoring afterward means a lot of travel to and long stays in San Diego.
It’s tough on Kulyk and Janz. They have to fly in from Alberta, Canada and stay in a San Diego hotel for weeks at a time. Kulyk has two older adult children, as well as a 12-year-old and a seven-year-old at home.
“I’ve missed a lot of things with my other kids, but none of them seem to hold any grudges,” she said. “They seem to be totally fine and accepting. They’re like, ‘We’re fine, mom. You go and take care of Jordan.’”
Janz is looking forward to getting back home to his friends, his dog and his job, which provided him with paid leave while he received treatment and recovers.
For Cherqui, the search for a cystinosis cure is more than just a scientific exercise. Cherqui began working on cystinosis as a graduate student more than 20 years ago. At the time, she said, it was simply a model in which to study genetics and gene therapy.
“When you read about cystinosis, it’s just words. You don’t put a face to it. But after I met all the families, met the kids, and now that I’ve seen many of them grow up, and some of them die of the disease — now it’s a personal fight, and they are my family too.”
Patients with cystinosis typically experience kidney failure in their 20s, requiring kidney dialysis or transplantation for survival. For those born with cystinosis who make it into adulthood, the average lifespan is approximately 28 years old.
“I’m optimistic about this trial because it’s something we’ve worked so hard for and now it’s actually happening, and these families have so much hope for a better treatment,” Cherqui said. “After all the years of painstaking laboratory research, we now need to move into the clinic. If this works, it will be wonderful. If it doesn’t, we will all be disappointed but a least we’ll be able to say we tried.”
Nancy Stack, who founded the Cystinosis Research Foundation after her own daughter, Natalie, was diagnosed with the disease, calls Cherqui “the rock star of our community.”
“She cares deeply about the patients and is always available to talk, to explain her work and to give us hope,” Stack said. “She said years ago that she would never give up until she found the cure — and now we are closer to a cure than ever before.” (Read more about Natalie here.)
In addition to cystinosis, Cherqui says this type of gene therapy approach could also lead to treatment advancements for other multi-organ degenerative disorders, such as Friedreich’s ataxia and Danon disease, as well as other kidney, genetic and systemic diseases similar to cystinosis.
While they wait for the long-term results of the treatment, Kulyk is cautiously hopeful.
“Moms are used to being able to fix everything for their children — kiss boo-boos make them better, make cupcakes for school, whip up Halloween costumes out of scraps, pull a coveted toy out of thin air when it has been sold out for months.
“But we have not been able to fix this, to take it away. I not only want this disease gone for my child, I want cystinosis to be nothing more than a memory for all the children and adults living with it. I know that even if and when Jordan is cured, there will still be so much work to do, in terms of regulatory approvals and insurance coverage.
“Having hope for your child’s disease to be cured is a slippery slope. We have all been there, held hope in our hands and had to let go. But, I find myself in a familiar place, holding onto hope again and this time I am not letting go.”
Video of Dr. Cherqui and Jordan Janz talking about the therapy
For more information about the Phase I/II clinical trial for cystinosis and to learn how to enroll, call 1-844-317-7836 or email alphastemcellclinic@ucsd.edu.
Cherqui’s research has been funded by the Cystinosis Research Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), and National Institutes of Health. She receives additional support from the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center and CIRM-funded Alpha Stem Cell Clinic at UC San Diego Health, and AVROBIO.
The Stem Cellar 