SMN
Clinical Trials Bring Hope to Kids with Spinal Muscular Atrophy
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Faith Fortenberry
More than a decade ago, the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) launched a special project to accelerate the translation of basic scientific discoveries into new treatments for a rare and often fatal disease. Five-year-old Faith Fortenberry whom you see above is among the kids who may benefit from the success of this pioneering endeavor.
Faith was born with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a hereditary neurodegenerative disease that can affect movement, breathing, and swallowing. When the NIH project began, there was no treatment for SMA, but researchers had discovered that mutations in the SMN1 gene were responsible for the disorder. Such mutations cause a deficiency of SMN protein, leading to degeneration of neurons in the brain and spinal cord, and progressive muscle weakness throughout the body. The NIH effort supported research to discover ways of raising SMN levels in cells grown in lab dishes, and then worked closely with patient advocates and pharmaceutical companies to move the most promising leads into drug development and clinical testing.
Given the desperate need for SMA treatments and all of the scientific energy that’s been devoted to pursuing them, I’ve been following this field closely. So, I was very encouraged to learn recently about the promising results of human tests of not just one—but two—new treatments for SMA [1, 2].
