Lancet

HOPE for patients with a muscle destroying disease

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

THIS BLOG IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN AUDIO CAST

Caleb Sizemore, photo by Todd Dubnicoff

Caleb Sizemore says growing up with Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) was tough. The disease is a rare genetic disorder that slowly destroys a person’s muscles, impairing their ability to walk or breathe. Eventually it attacks the heart leading to premature death.

Caleb says the disease meant “I was limited in what I could do, where I couldn’t play sports and where I was teased and bullied sometimes for being different.”

In the past people with DMD – almost all of whom are boys – lost the ability to walk by the age of 12, and many died in their 20’s. But a new treatment – originally funded by CIRM – is showing promise in helping reverse some of the damage caused by the disease.

Dr. Craig McDonald working with a person who has DMD: Photo courtesy UC Davis

Results from a clinical trial – published in the journal Lancet – showed that the therapy helped halt the decline in muscle strength in the arms and hands, and in MRI’s appeared to improve heart function.

In a news release, Dr. Craig McDonald, a UC Davis professor and the lead author of the study, said: “The trial produced statistically significant and unprecedented stabilization of both skeletal muscle deterioration affecting the arms and heart deterioration of structure and function in non-ambulatory DMD patients.”

The therapy, called CAP-1002, uses cells derived from the human heart that have previously demonstrated the ability to reduce muscle inflammation and enhance cell regeneration. The clinical trial, called HOPE-2 (Halt cardiomyopathy progression in Duchenne).

Dr. McDonald says with current treatments only having a limited impact on the disease, CAP-1002 may have a big impact on the people affected by DMD and their families.

“The trial showed consistent benefits of this cell-based therapy. It suggests that this infusion may be an important treatment option for the boys and young men who have this debilitating disorder.”

The team now hope to be able to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to start a bigger clinical trial involving more patients.

Caleb Sizemore took part in an earlier clinical trial involving this approach. He says MRI’s showed that the therapy appeared to reduce scarring on his heart and gave him greater energy.

In 2017 Caleb talked to the CIRM governing Board about DMD and his part in the clinical trial. You can see that video here.

Stem cell research reveals path to schizophrenia

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments
3d illustration of brain nerve cells – Photo courtesy Science Photo

If you don’t know what’s causing a problem it’s hard to come up with a good way to fix it. Mental health is the perfect example. With a physical illness you can see what the problem is, through blood tests or x-rays, and develop a plan to tackle it. But with the brain, that’s a lot harder. You can’t autopsy a brain while someone is alive, they tend to object, so you often only see the results of a neurological illness when they’re dead.

And, says Consuelo Walss-Bass, PhD, a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), with mental illness it’s even more complicated.

“Mental health research has lagged behind because we don’t know what is happening biologically. We are diagnosing people based on what they are telling us. Even postmortem, the brain tissue in mental health disorders looks perfectly fine. In Alzheimer’s disease, you can see a difference compared to controls. But not in psychiatric disorders.”

So Wals-Bass and her team came up with a way to see what was going on inside the brain of someone with schizophrenia, in real time, to try and understand what puts someone at increased risk of the disorder.

In the study, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the researchers took blood samples from a family with a high incidence of schizophrenia. Then, using the iPSC method, they turned those cells into brain neurons and compared them to the neurons of individuals with no family history of schizophrenia. In effect, they did a virtual brain biopsy.

By doing this they were able to identify five genes that had previously been linked to a potential higher risk of schizophrenia and then narrow that down further, highlighting one gene called SGK1 which blocked an important signalling pathway in the brain.

In a news release, Walss-Bass says this findings could have important implications in treating patients.

“There is a new antipsychotic that just received approval from the Food and Drug Administration that directly targets the pathway we identified as dysregulated in neurons from the patients, and several other antipsychotics also target this pathway. This could help pinpoint who may respond better to treatments.”

Finding the right treatment for individual patients is essential in helping them keep their condition under control. A study in the medical journal Lancet estimated that six months after first being prescribed common antipsychotic medication, as many as 50% of patients are either taking the drugs haphazardly or not at all. That’s because they often come with unpleasant side effects such as weight gain, drowsiness and a kind of restless anxiety.

By identifying people who have specific gene pathways linked to schizophrenia could help us better tailor medications to those who will benefit most by them.