Three families battling a life-threatening immune disorder got some great news last week. A clinical trial that could save the life of their child has once again been given the go-ahead by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The clinical trial is the work of UCLA’s Dr. Don Kohn, and was strongly supported by CIRM. It is targeting ADA-SCID, a condition where the child is born without a functioning immune system so even a simple infection could prove fatal. In the past they were called “bubble babies” because some had been placed inside sterile plastic bubbles to protect them from germs.
Dr. Kohn’s approach – using the patient’s own blood stem cells, modified in the lab to correct the genetic mutation that causes the problem – had shown itself to be amazingly effective. In a study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers showed that of 50 patients treated all had done well and 97 percent were considered cured.
UCLA licensed the therapy to Orchard Therapeutics, who planned to complete the testing needed to apply for permission to make it more widely available. But Orchard ran into problems and shelved the therapy.
After lengthy negotiations Orchard returned the therapy to UCLA last year and now the FDA has given clearance for UCLA to resume treating patients. That is expected to start early next year using CIRM funds left over when Orchard halted its work.
One of the people who played a big role in helping persuade Orchard to return the therapy to UCLA is Alysia Vaccaro. She is the mother of Evie, a child born with ADA-SCID who was cured by Dr. Kohn and his team and is now a thriving 9 year old.
You can watch an interview we did with Alysia about the impact this research has had on her family, and how important it is for other families with ADA-SCID kids.
Clinical fellow Brian Shy talks with postdoctoral scholar Tori Yamamoto in the Marson Lab at Gladstone Institutes on June 8th, 2022. Photo courtesy Gladstone Institutes.
For years scientists have been touting the potential of CRISPR, a gene editing tool that allows you to target a specific mutation and either cut it out or replace it with the corrected form of the gene. But like all new tools it had its limitations. One important one was the difficult in delivering the corrected gene to mature cells in large numbers.
Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and U.C. San Francisco say they think they have found a way around that. And the implications for using this technique to develop new therapies for deadly diseases are profound.
In the past scientists used inactivated viruses as a way to deliver corrected copies of the gene to patients. We have blogged about UCLA’s Dr. Don Kohn using this approach to treat children born with SCID, a deadly immune disorder. But that was both time consuming and expensive.
CRISPR, on the other hand, showed that it could be easier to use and less expensive. But getting it to produce enough cells for an effective therapy proved challenging.
The team at Gladstone and UCSF found a way around that by switching from using CRISPR to deliver a double-stranded DNA to correct the gene (which is toxic to cells in large quantities), and instead using CRISPR to deliver a single stranded DNA (you can read the full, very technical description of their approach in the study they published in the journal Nature Biotechnology).
Alex Marson, MD, PhD, director of the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology and the senior author of the study, said this more than doubled the efficiency of the process. “One of our goals for many years has been to put lengthy DNA instructions into a targeted site in the genome in a way that doesn’t depend on viral vectors. This is a huge step toward the next generation of safe and effective cell therapies.”
It has another advantage too, according to Gladstone’s Dr. Jonathan Esensten, an author of the study. “This technology has the potential to make new cell and gene therapies faster, better, and less expensive.”
The team has already used this method to generate more than one billion CAR-T cells – specialized immune system cells that can target cancers such as multiple myeloma – and says it could also prove effective in targeting some rare genetic immune diseases.
While there have been some encouraging advances in treating cancer in recent decades, there are still many cancers that either resist treatment or recur after treatment. Today the governing Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) approved investing in a therapy targeting some of these hard-to-treat tumors.
BioEclipse Therapeutics Inc. was awarded nearly $8M to test a therapy using immune cells loaded with a cancer-killing virus that targets cancer tissue but spares healthy tissue.
BioEclipse combines two approaches—an immune cell called a cytokine-induced killer (CIK) cell and a virus engineered to kill cancer cells called an oncolytic virus (OV)—to create what they call “a multi-mechanistic, targeted treatment.”
They will use the patient’s own immune cells and, in the lab, combine them with the OV. The cell/virus combination will then be administered back to the patient. The job of the CIK cells is to carry the virus to the tumors. The virus is designed to specifically attack and kill tumors and stimulate the patient’s immune system to attack the tumor cells. The goal is to eradicate the primary tumor and prevent relapse and recurrence.
“With the intent to develop this treatment for chemotherapy-resistant or refractory solid tumors—including colorectal cancer, triple negative breast cancer, ovarian cancer, gastric cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, and osteosarcoma—it addresses a significant unmet medical need in fatal conditions for which there are limited treatment options,” says Dr. Maria T. Millan, President and CEO of CIRM.
The CIRM Board also approved more than $18 million in funding four projects under the Translation Projects program. The goal of this program is to support promising regenerative medicine (stem cell-based or gene therapy) projects that accelerate completion of translational stage activities necessary for advancement to clinical study or broad end use.
The awards went to:
Application
Title
Institution
Award Amount
TRAN1-133442
Optogenetic therapy for treating retinitis pigmentosa and other inherited retinal diseases
Paul Bresge Ray Therapeutics Inc.
$3,999,553
TRAN3-13332
Living Synthetic Vascular Grafts with Renewable Endothelium
Aijun Wang UC Davis
$3,112,567
TRAN1-13370
Next generation affinity-tuned CAR for prostate cancer
Preet Chaudhary University of Southern California
$5,805,144
TRAN1-3345
Autologous MPO Knock-Out Hematopoietic Stem and Progenitor Cells for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension
Photo courtesy of Tamara Hogue/UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center
Leukocyte adhesion deficiency type 1 (LAD-1) is a rare pediatric disorder that causes the immune system to malfunction, resulting in recurrent, often severe, bacterial and fungal infections as well as delayed wound healing. This is because of a missing protein that would normally enable white blood cells to stick to blood vessel walls- a crucial step that is needed before moving outside the vessel walls and into tissues to fight infections. If left undiagnosed and untreated, LAD-1 is fatal and most children with the disorder will die before the age of 2.
When Marley Gaskins was finally diagnosed with LAD-1 at age 8 (an extraordinary feat on its own) she had already spent countless hours hospitalized and required round the clock attention and care. The only possible cure was a risky bone marrow transplant from a matched donor, a procedure so rarely performed that there is no data to determine the survival rate.
In search of a better treatment option, Marley’s family came across a clinical trial for children with LAD-1 led by Dr. Donald Kohn, MD, a researcher in the UCLA Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research.
The novel clinical trial, sponsored by Rocket Pharmaceuticals and CIRM, uses gene therapy in a treatment that works by harvesting the defective blood-making stem cells, correcting the mutation in a lab, and then transplanting the properly functioning cells back into the child’s body. The process eliminates the potential rejection risks of a bone marrow transplant because the corrected cells are the patient’s own.
For Marley’s family, the decision was a no-brainer. “I didn’t hesitate in letting her be a participant in the trial,” Marley’s mother, Tamara Hogue explains, “because I knew in my heart that this would give her a chance at having a normal life.”
In 2019, 9-year-old Marley became the first LAD-1 patient ever to receive the stem cell gene therapy. In the following year, five more children received the gene therapy at UCLA, including three siblings. And Last week, Dr. Kohn reported at the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting and Exposition that all the children “remain healthy and disease-free”.
More than two years out of treatment, Marley’s life and daily activities are no longer constricted by the frequent and severe infections that kept her returning to the hospital for months at a time. Instead, she enjoys being an average 12-year-old: going camping, getting her ears pierced, and most importantly, attending what she calls “big school” in the coming year. For patients and families alike, the gene therapy’s success has been like a rebirth. Doctors expect that the one-time therapy will keep LAD-1 patients healthy for life.
Dr. Rosa Bacchetta on the right with Brian Lookofsky (left) and Taylor Lookofsky after CIRM funded Dr. Bacchetta’s work in October 2019. Taylor has IPEX syndrome
It’s always lovely to end the week on a bright note and that’s certainly the case this week, thanks to some encouraging news about CIRM-funded research targeting blood disorders that affect the immune system.
Stanford’s Dr. Rosa Bacchetta and her team learned that their proposed therapy for IPEX Syndrome had been given the go-ahead by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test it in people in a Phase 1 clinical trial.
IPEX Syndrome (it’s more formal and tongue twisting name is Immune dysregulation Polyendocrinopathy Enteropathy X-linked syndrome) is a life-threatening disorder that affects children. It’s caused by a mutation in the FOXP3 gene. Immune cells called regulatory T Cells normally function to protect tissues from damage but in patients with IPEX syndrome, lack of functional Tregs render the body’s own tissues and organs to autoimmune attack that could be fatal in early childhood.
Current treatment options include a bone marrow transplant which is limited by available donors and graft versus host disease and immune suppressive drugs that are only partially effective. Dr. Rosa Bacchetta and her team at Stanford will use gene therapy to insert a normal version of the FOXP3 gene into the patient’s own T Cells to restore the normal function of regulatory T Cells.
This approach has already been accorded an orphan drug and rare pediatric disease designation by the FDA (we blogged about it last year)
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.
Under the FDA’s rare pediatric disease designation program, the FDA may grant priority review to Dr. Bacchetta if this treatment eventually receives FDA approval. The FDA defines a rare pediatric disease as a serious or life-threatening disease in which the serious or life-threatening manifestations primarily affect individuals aged from birth to 18 years and affects fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S.
Congratulations to the team and we wish them luck as they begin the trial.
Dr. Donald Kohn, Photo courtesy UCLA
Someone who needs no introduction to regular readers of this blog is UCLA’s Dr. Don Kohn. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine highlighted how his work in developing a treatment for severe combined immune deficiency (SCID) has helped save the lives of dozens of children.
Now a new study in the journal Blood shows that those benefits are long-lasting, with 90% of patients who received the treatment eight to 11 years ago still disease-free.
In a news release Dr. Kohn said: “What we saw in the first few years was that this therapy worked, and now we’re able to say that it not only works, but it works for more than 10 years. We hope someday we’ll be able to say that these results last for 80 years.”
Ten children received the treatment between 2009 and 2012. Nine were babies or very young children, one was 15 years old at the time. That teenager was the only one who didn’t see their immune system restored. Dr. Kohn says this suggests that the therapy is most effective in younger children.
Dr. Kohn has since modified the approach his team uses and has seen even more impressive and, we hope, equally long-lasting results.
Brenden Whittaker was born with a rare genetic disorder called X-linked chronic granulomatous disease (X-CGD). This condition affects the immune system’s ability to fight off common germs, specifically bacteria and fungi, and can result in infections that would only be mild for healthy people. Unfortunately for Brenden, he has suffered life-threatening infections that have required him to be hospitalized hundreds of times throughout most of his childhood. At only 16 years old, he got a very bad case of pneumonia that resulted in having tissue from his right lung removed. By age 22, the treatments he had received to fight off infections had stopped working entirely.
His prognosis looked grim, but fortunately he was informed of a CIRM-funded clinical trial conducted by Dr. Don Kohn to treat his condition. He would go on to become the first participant in this trial, which involved taking his blood stem cells, using gene therapy to correct the X-CGD mutation, and reintroducing these modified cells back into his body. Following his treatment, blood tests confirmed that the treatment produced enough corrected cells for Brenden to now be protected from severe infection.
Before the CIRM-funded treatment, the chances of severe infection were virtually everywhere, something many of us might better understand given everything going on with COVID-19. But now with a new lease on life, Brenden is giving back to the very community that helped him in his time of need. He is currently working as a patient care associate at his local hospital in Ohio. Considered an essential worker, Brenden’s responsibilities include taking patients’ vital signs, helping them eat and get cleaned up, and going for walks around the unit with those who are able to do so. He also plans to attend nursing school in the future.
In a news release, Brenden talks about wanting to give back to those in similar situations as him and demonstrates true selflessness.
“My job entails doing anything I can to make a patient’s time in the hospital a little bit easier while at the same time helping the doctors and nurses monitor for any new health developments. From the nurses who sat with me holding my hand and telling me about their lives when I was up in the middle of the night with a fever, to the patient transporters who remembered my name and talked with me the whole way to surgery, to the doctors who wouldn’t give up until they found an option that worked for me, these people are the reason the hospital setting is the only place I want to work. If I can help even one person the way these people have helped me, I will be happy.”
In addition to Brenden, five additional patients who received the same treatment for X-CGD are also doing well. This same gene therapy approach for blood stem cells was used in another CIRM-funded trial for SCID, another kind of genetic immune disorder. The SCID trial resulted in over 50 babies being cured of the condition, including little Evie, who is featured on the cover of CIRM’s 18-month report.
You can’t look at this photo and not smile. This is Evie Vaccaro, and it’s clear she is just bursting with energy and vitality. Sometimes it feels like I have known Evie all her life. In a way I have. And I feel so fortunate to have done so, and that’s why this photo is so powerful, because it’s a life that almost ended before it had a chance to start.
Evie was born with a rare condition called Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID). Children with this condition lack a functioning immune system so even a simple cold or diaper rash can prove fatal. Imagine how perilous their lives are in a time of COVID-19. These children used to be called “bubble babies” because they were often kept inside sterile plastic bubbles to keep them alive. Many died before their second birthday.
Today there is no need for plastic bubbles. Today, we have a cure. That’s a word we use very cautiously, but in Evie’s case, and the case of more than 40 other children, we use it with pride.
Dr. Don Kohn and a child born with SCID
Dr. Don Kohn at UCLA has developed a method of taking the child’s own blood stem cells and, in the lab, inserting a corrected copy of the gene that caused SCID, and then returning those cells to the child. Because they are stem cells they multiply and renew and replicate themselves, creating a new blood supply, one free of the SCID mutation. The immune system is restored. The children are cured.
This is a story we have told several times before, but we mention it again because, well, it never gets old, and because Evie is on the front and back cover of our upcoming Annual Report. The report is actually a look back on the last 18 months in CIRM’s life, reporting on the progress we have made in advancing stem cell research, in saving and changing lives, and in producing economic benefits for California (billions of dollars in sales revenue and taxes and thousands of jobs).
Evie’s story, Evie’s photo, is a reminder of what is possible thanks to the voters of California who created CIRM back in 2004. Hers is just one of the stories in the report. I think, you’ll enjoy reading all of them.
Welcome back to our “Throwback Thursday” series on the Stem Cellar. Over the years, we’ve accumulated an arsenal of exciting stem cell stories about advances towards stem cell-based cures for serious diseases. Today we’re featuring stories about the progress of CIRM-funded clinical trials for the treatment of a devastating, usually fatal, primary immune disease that strikes newborn babies.
Evie, a former “bubble baby” enjoying life by playing inside a giant plastic bubble
‘Bubble baby disease’ will one day be a thing of the past. That’s a bold statement, but I say it with confidence because of the recent advancements in stem cell gene therapies that are curing infants of this life-threatening immune disease.
The scientific name for ‘bubble baby disease’ is severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). It prevents the proper development of important immune cells called B and T cells, leaving newborns without a functioning immune system. Because of this, SCID babies are highly susceptible to deadly infections, and without treatment, most of these babies do not live past their first year. Even a simple cold virus can be fatal.
Scientists are working hard to develop stem cell-based gene therapies that will cure SCID babies in their first months of life before they succumb to infections. The technology involves taking blood stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and genetically correcting the SCID mutation in the DNA of these cells. The corrected stem cells are then transplanted back into the patient where they can grow and regenerate a healthy immune system. Early-stage clinical trials testing these stem cell gene therapies are showing very encouraging results. We’ll share a few of these stories with you below.
CIRM-funded trials for SCID
CIRM is funding three clinical trials, one from UCLA, one at Stanford and one from UCSF & St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, that are treating different forms of SCID using stem cell gene therapies.
Adenosine Deaminase-Deficient SCID
The first trial is targeting a form of the disease called adenosine deaminase-deficient SCID or ADA-SCID. Patients with ADA-SCID are unable to make an enzyme that is essential for the function of infection-fighting immune cells called lymphocytes. Without working lymphocytes, infants eventually are diagnosed with SCID at 6 months. ADA-SCID occurs in approximately 1 in 200,000 newborns and makes up 15% of SCID cases.
CIRM is funding a Phase 2 trial for ADA-SCID that is testing a stem cell gene therapy called OTL-101 developed by Dr. Don Kohn and his team at UCLA and a company called Orchard Therapeutics. 10 patients were treated in the trial, and amazingly, nine of these patients were cured of their disease. The 10th patient was a teenager who received the treatment knowing that it might not work as it does in infants. You can read more about this trial in our blog from earlier this year.
In a recent news release, Orchard Therapeutics announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has awarded Rare Pediatric Disease Designation to OTL-101, meaning that the company will qualify for priority review for drug approval by the FDA. You can read more about what this designation means in this blog.
X-linked SCID
The second SCID trial CIRM is funding is treating patients with X-linked SCID. These patients have a genetic mutation on a gene located on the X-chromosome that causes the disease. Because of this, the disease usually affects boys who have inherited the mutation from their mothers. X-linked SCID is the most common form of SCID and appears in 1 in 60,000 infants.
UCSF and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital are conducting a Phase 1/2 trial for X-linked SCID. The trial, led by Dr. Brian Sorrentino, is transplanting a patient’s own genetically modified blood stem cells back into their body to give them a healthy new immune system. Patients do receive chemotherapy to remove their diseased bone marrow, but doctors at UCSF are optimizing low doses of chemotherapy for each patient to minimize any long-term effects. According to a UCSF news release, the trial is planning to treat 15 children over the next five years. Some of these patients have already been treated and we will likely get updates on their progress next year.
CIRM is also funding a third clinical trial out of Stanford University that is hoping to make bone marrow transplants safer for X-linked SCID patients. The team, led by Dr. Judy Shizuru, is developing a therapy that will remove unhealthy blood stem cells from SCID patients to improve the survival and engraftment of healthy bone marrow transplants. You can read more about this trial on our clinical trials page.
SCID Patients Cured by Stem Cells
These clinical trial results are definitely exciting, but what is more exciting are the patient stories that we have to share. We’ve spoken with a few of the families whose children participated in the UCLA and UCSF/St. Jude trials, and we asked them to share their stories so that other families can know that there is hope. They are truly inspiring stories of heartbreak and joyful celebration.
Evie is a now six-year-old girl who was diagnosed with ADA-SCID when she was just a few months old. She is now cured thanks to Don Kohn and the UCLA trial. Her mom gave a very moving presentation about Evie’s journey at the CIRM Bridges Trainee Annual Meeting this past July. You can watch the 20-minute talk below:
Ronnie’s story
Ronnie: Photo courtesy Pawash Priyank
Ronnie, who is still less than a year old, was diagnosed with X-linked SCID just days after he was born. Luckily doctors told his parents about the UCSF/St. Jude trial and Ronnie was given the life-saving stem cell gene therapy before he was six months old. Now Ronnie is building a healthy immune system and is doing well back at home with his family. Ronnie’s dad Pawash shared his families moving story at our September Board meeting and you can watch it here.
Our mission at CIRM is to accelerate stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs. We hope that by funding promising clinical trials like the ones mentioned in this blog, that one day soon there will be approved stem cell therapies for patients with SCID and other life-threatening diseases.
A year ago the CIRM Board unanimously approved a new Strategic Plan for the stem cell agency. In the plan are some rather ambitious goals, including funding ten new clinical trials in 2016. For much of the last year that has looked very ambitious indeed. But today the Board took a big step towards reaching that goal, approving three clinical trials focused on some deadly or life-threatening conditions.
The first is Forty Seven Inc.’s work targeting colorectal cancer, using a monoclonal antibody that can strip away the cancer cells ability to evade the immune system. The immune system can then attack the cancer. But just in case that’s not enough they’re going to hit the tumor from another side with an anti-cancer drug called cetuximab. It’s hoped this one-two punch combination will get rid of the cancer.
Finding something to help the estimated 49,000 people who die of colorectal cancer in the U.S. every year would be no small achievement. The CIRM Board thought this looked so promising they awarded Forty Seven Inc. $10.2 million to carry out a clinical trial to test if this approach is safe. We funded a similar approach by researchers at Stanford targeting solid tumors in the lung and that is showing encouraging results.
Our Board also awarded $7.35 million to a team at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles that is using stem cells to treat pulmonary hypertension, a form of high blood pressure in the lungs. This can have a devastating, life-changing impact on a person leaving them constantly short of breath, dizzy and feeling exhausted. Ultimately it can lead to heart failure.
The team at Cedars-Sinai will use cells called cardiospheres, derived from heart stem cells, to reduce inflammation in the arteries and reduce blood pressure. CIRM is funding another project by this team using a similar approach to treat people who have suffered a heart attack. This work showed such promise in its Phase 1 trial it’s now in a larger Phase 2 clinical trial.
The largest award, worth $20 million, went to target one of the rarest diseases. A team from UCLA, led by Don Kohn, is focusing on Adenosine Deaminase Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (ADA-SCID), which is a rare form of a rare disease. Children born with this have no functioning immune system. It is often fatal in the first few years of life.
The UCLA team will take the patient’s own blood stem cells, genetically modify them to fix the mutation that is causing the problem, then return them to the patient to create a new healthy blood and immune system. The team have successfully used this approach in curing 23 SCID children in the last few years – we blogged about it here – and now they have FDA approval to move this modified approach into a Phase 2 clinical trial.
So why is CIRM putting money into projects that it has either already funded in earlier clinical trials or that have already shown to be effective? There are a number of reasons. First, our mission is to accelerate stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs. Each of the diseases funded today represent an unmet medical need. Secondly, if something appears to be working for one problem why not try it on another similar one – provided the scientific rationale and evidence shows it is appropriate of course.
As Randy Mills, our President and CEO, said in a news release:
“Our Board’s support for these programs highlights how every member of the CIRM team shares that commitment to moving the most promising research out of the lab and into patients as quickly as we can. These are very different projects, but they all share the same goal, accelerating treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.”
We are trying to create a pipeline of projects that are all moving towards the same goal, clinical trials in people. Pipelines can be horizontal as well as vertical. So we don’t really care if the pipeline moves projects up or sideways as long as they succeed in moving treatments to patients. And I’m guessing that patients who get treatments that change their lives don’t particularly
It’s been quite a year in stem cell research. Here at the stem cell agency eight projects that we are funding have been approved for clinical trials and several more hope to get approval in early 2015. And Dr. Don Kohn and his team at UCLA announced that they have effectively cured Severe Combined Immunodeficiency or SCID a fatal disease that leaves infants with no immune system.
But the news hasn’t been all good. A number of high profile retractions of studies published in prestigious journals have drawn attention to some of the less lovely aspects of science. There are many reasons why a researcher or scientific journal decides to retract a study – falsified data, inability of others to reproduce the findings etc. – but the end result is always the same, a stain on the reputation of science in general.
Of course the only thing worse than a retraction is bad science that is not retracted. That’s why websites such as Retraction Watch are so important. They keep an eye on the field and help draw attention to questionable papers (in all areas of science, not just stem cell research).
Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch
The two founders of the site, Evan Marcus and Ivan Oransky, do a remarkable job of highlighting work that doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. This year they worked with the magazine Science to highlight The Top 10 Retractions of 2014. Sadly, two of the top 10 – including the number one story of the year – concern stem cell research.
The list is a reminder, as we look forward to 2015 for more progress in the field, that we need to always check the credibility of studies or sources we are using. Sometimes something that seems too good to be true, is too good to be true.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the flip side of this discussion, the “Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2014”. It’s always good to end the year on a positive note.
The Stem Cellar 