News

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration(FDA) is updating its 2015 draft guidelines for drug discovery in rare diseases, with new guidance on natural history— how disorders such as spinal muscle atrophy(SMA) run their course if untreated — the choice of “efficacy endpoints” in clinical trials, and how…

The U.S. Food And Drug Administration (FDA) has granted orphan drug status to Avrobio’s investigational gene therapy AVR-RD-01 for the treatment of Fabry disease. AVR-RD-01 is being tested in two separate clinical trials that are still recruiting patients: AVRO-RD-01-201 Phase 2 trial (NCT03454893) and an investigator-sponsored Phase…

Protalix BioTherapeutics announced it has completed enrollment of its Phase 3 trial evaluating PRX-102 in Fabry disease patients previously treated with Shire’s Replagal (agalsidase alfa). The BRIDGE trial (NCT03018730) is an open-label switch-over study that will assess the safety and efficacy of PRX-102 in 22 patients with Fabry disease treated with Replagal for…

Cash-strapped governments across the 28-member European Union are struggling to control runaway healthcare expenditures — at exactly the same time as the promise of new but expensive therapies to treat rare diseases has never been greater. That’s the paradox faced by pharmaceutical companies as well as patient advocacy groups in…

Globotriaosylsphingosine (LysoGb3) blood levels can be a useful and accurate biomarker to diagnose and monitor Fabry disease, rather than only using GLA mutational status, researchers suggest. The study, “Mutations in the GLA Gene and LysoGb3: Is It Really Anderson-Fabry Disease?,” was published in the International Journal…

Fabry Stabilization index (FASTEX) is a valid, specific, and sensible instrument to accurately assess disease stability/progression in people with classic or non-classic Fabry disease, a large study showed. The results highlighted the value of using this tool in the clinical setting to monitor Fabry patients in a standardized way.