I'm talking parents of rare children. Specifically, I'm sharing an update on the PIGN-CDG drug-repurposing project. If you don't have time to read much, then check out this update from Perlara: Research Update. If you have more time, continue on.
As you may be aware from prior posts, our rare community is researching whether existing known drugs or compounds could be beneficial in helping our PIGN children. You can read more about the initial scope of the project here: Drug Repurposing Fundraising Many of you have generously donated directly or supported AJ's fundraisers selling fidgets and dragons that he creates himself on our 3-D printer. (You can still donate directly here: Tax-Deductible Donation or order dragons/fidgets here: AJ's Fundraiser)
To greatly simplify PIGN-CDG, Teddy's body cannot process sugars on the most basic cellular level. If you recall sugar chains and cell processing from biology, well, kudos to you because I don't. But you can think of it like an assembly line in a factory that has a broken part that prevents most of the pieces from being perfectly assembled. They may be somewhat functional, but it's rare (no pun intended) that they are fully functional. This results in all the challenges our children face, from seizures to hypotonia to respiratory challenges to developmental delays and the list continues. Their bodies don't function right on the cellular level, which obviously impacts them as a whole.
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| It doesn't stop Ted from enjoying flying fighter jets, though. |
This also complicates potential treatments because all medications and treatments can be impacted as well by these faulty sugar chains and processing problems. Everything can be a bit (or a lot) off with our children. Combine that with the fact that there are approximately 100 known cases of PIGN-CDG, and well, it's understandable why there's no treatment for this disorder. We can only treat the individual symptoms (aka treat the seizures, manage the hypotonia, etc.) and do nothing to improve the overall health of our children.
That's why this drug-repurposing project is invaluable. This ground-breaking scientific research is taking a huge bank of known medications and compounds to see if anything that already exists could be used to improve the overall health. This is a long, expensive process.
But it's so exciting that we're seeing promising results. As Perlara's update shares, some families have been piloting ascorbyl palmitate and seeing improvements. This compound can be easily accessed without a prescription in many countries, though each family must still work through their medical team. We are a bit later to start due to the events of last year, but we have baseline labs scheduled in a week with a bottle of ascorbyl palmitate secured. (Hmm, that reminds me we need to take baseline videos of Teddy this weekend.) We will start him at a low dose for a month, monitor and recheck labs and then potentially increase his dose.
While we don't anticipate any overnight, drastic changes, any improvements for our PIGN children are huge. You may read the research update and think, well, that's just normal developmental milestones - it could be just that the child is getting older and advancing. But our children don't follow normal milestones, and they lag months or years behind most, if they achieve them. So any progress noted in a couple months of trialing the compound is fairly reasonably associated with the compound (though we will leave that up to the scientists and doctors with baseline and other labs, video evidence, recorded seizures, etc.)
We're excited about what this could mean for Teddy. We're excited about what it could mean for all our PIGN families, both present and those who get this difficult diagnosis in the future. So the next steps, while we continue to fundraise, is that because it's an over-the-counter compound, we're able to pilot and trial on our own as families (similar to how we've fundraised) without FDA approval. Perlara is busy in the lab and will be testing the best hits, including this ascorbyl palmitate, on the DNA samples from various PIGN children, including Teddy. This is the next step to evaluate what works best with real human PIGN mutations (of which there are many). The hope is that we continue to make progress and do move to the point of FDA trails, whether for this compound we have now or something different.
The science will take years, and we so appreciate your generosity and support. It's exciting (and expensive) to be at the forefront of medical and scientific research that will directly benefit others like Teddy.
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