News

The EveryLife Foundation for Rare Diseases is accepting applications for a scholarship program that aims to help adults with a rare disease pursue personal goals through training and education. For a second year, the #RAREis Scholarship Fund — supported by Horizon Therapeutics – will award 35 one-time scholarships, each…

Activities ranging from sharing educational posters to “breaking a sweat” are underway to mark Fabry Disease Awareness Month, set aside each April to call attention to this rare genetic disorder. Awareness and education are crucial to increasing the recognition, diagnosis, understanding, and management of Fabry disease, estimated to affect about…

As anyone affected by a rare disease knows, treating the illness while trying to go about everyday life is an expensive undertaking.  But exactly how expensive — in terms of direct and indirect costs across rare disease populations — might still come as a surprise: almost…

Long-term treatment with Fabrazyme (agalsidase beta), an enzyme replacement therapy for people with Fabry disease, slows the progression of kidney disease and significantly delays arriving at outcomes that include heart or kidney failure, results from clinical and real-world studies show. Findings from this work — a Phase 4 clinical trial…

NanoGLA — a potentially more effective version of enzyme replacement therapy that delivers the missing enzyme in Fabry disease through tiny fatty vesicles — has been designated an orphan drug by the European Commission. The decision was based on a positive recommendation by the Committee for Orphan Medicinal Products, a branch of…

A once-a-month regimen of the investigational enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) PRX-102 (pegunigalsidase alfa) is safe and effective at maintaining disease stability in adults with Fabry disease, top-line data from the BRIGHT Phase 3 trial show. All were previously being treated twice a month with a commercially available ERT. “Patients…

Many diseases have their own awareness color — breast cancer is pink, muscular dystrophy is green, and AIDS is red, for example — but what’s the significance of pink, green, blue, and purple lights side-by-side? These are the colors most often used to represent Rare Disease Day. This…

Freeline Therapeutics has developed a more robust test to detect the presence of neutralizing antibodies that affect the effectiveness of enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) or gene therapy in people with Fabry disease. The new test fulfills an unmet need for a standard, reliable positive sample (used as a…

Diagnosed with sickle cell disease as a 6-month-old, Tristan Lee has faced a lot of challenges over his 37 years of life. But from a young age, he also learned how to turn those trials into triumphs. At age 9, a stroke due to his disease left him paralyzed…

Rare Disease Day at NIH, organized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and taking place on March 1, will feature panel discussions, patient stories, research updates, TED-style talks, and a presentation by a Nobel laureate recently recognized for her work on a gene editing tool. The free, virtual…