News

Rare diseases deeply affect not only the children who experience them, but also their healthy brothers and sisters, as their parents can attest.    Two entries in November’s “Disorder: The Rare Disease Film Festival” will focus on what siblings go through, according to the San Francisco festival’s co-founder,…

Developing gene therapies for rare diseases is one thing. Creating gene-edited “designer babies” is quite another. German legal expert Timo Minssen outlined the potentially explosive ethical landmines surrounding such issues during a recent talk at the New York Genome Center. Minssen directs the Center for Advanced Studies in…

Pulmonary infection with a specific species of the Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC), called Mycobacterium intracellulare, can be aggressive in people with cystic fibrosis (CF), with a greater loss of lung function evident but a lesser incidence of a secondary lung infection, a single-site study reports. This species also responded best…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted priority review to Vertex’s new drug application for its triple combination — elexacaftor (VX-445) plus tezacaftor and Kalydeco (ivacaftor) — for cystic fibrosis (CF) patients who cannot use the company’s other disease-modifying treatments or don’t benefit as intended.

Path BioAnalytics (PBA), a biotechnology company based in North Carolina, has licensed the rights to further develop cavosonstat (N91115), a targeted therapy for cystic fibrosis (CF), from the Chinese company Laurel Therapeutics. Cavosonstat is a small molecule designed to increase the stability of the CFTR protein, defects of which cause CF.