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AVROBIO Receives Orphan Drug Designation from the European Medicines Agency for AVR-RD-02, an Investigational Gene Therapy for Gaucher Disease
AVROBIO Receives Orphan Drug Designation from the European Medicines Agency for AVR-RD-02, an Investigational Gene Therapy for Gaucher Disease
“Like many lysosomal disorders, Gaucher disease can lead to debilitating complications throughout the body and brain. The standard of care does not address all these symptoms and may not be able to halt progression of the disease,” said
AVR-RD-02 has also received orphan drug designation from the
About Gaucher Disease
Gaucher disease is a rare, inherited lysosomal storage disorder characterized by the toxic accumulation of glucosylceramide (GlcCer) and glucosylsphingosine (GlcSph) in macrophages. Macrophages bloated with these fatty substances are called Gaucher cells which amass primarily in the spleen, liver and bone marrow. This results in a variety of potential symptoms, including grossly enlarged liver and spleen, bone issues, fatigue, low hemoglobin levels and platelet counts and an adjusted lifetime relative risk of developing Parkinson's disease that may be more than 20 times greater than the general population. Even on enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) – the current standard of care – people with Gaucher disease type 1 typically have a shortened life expectancy and may experience debilitating symptoms that significantly reduce their quality of life. An estimated 1 in 44,000 people are diagnosed with Gaucher disease.
About AVR-RD-02
AVR-RD-02 is an investigational lentiviral gene therapy designed to provide a durable therapeutic benefit for people living with Gaucher disease. The therapy starts with the patient’s own hematopoietic stem cells, which are genetically modified to express functional glucocerebrosidase (GCase). Functional GCase reduces levels of glucosylceramide and glucosylsphingosine, the accumulated substances which cause the symptoms of Gaucher disease.
About lentiviral gene therapy
Lentiviral vectors are differentiated from other delivery mechanisms because of their large cargo capacity and their ability to integrate the therapeutic gene directly into the patient’s chromosomes. This integration is designed to maintain the therapeutic gene’s presence as the patient’s cells divide, which potentially enables dosing of pediatric patients, whose cells divide rapidly as they grow. Because the therapeutic gene is integrated into the patients’ own stem cells, patients are not excluded from receiving the investigational therapy due to pre-existing antibodies to the vector.
About
Our vision is to bring personalized gene therapy to the world. We aim to halt or reverse disease throughout the body by driving durable expression of functional protein, even in hard-to-reach tissues and organs including the brain, muscle and bone. Our clinical-stage programs include Fabry disease, Gaucher disease and cystinosis and we also are advancing a preclinical program in Pompe disease.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements may be identified by words and phrases such as “aims,” “anticipates,” “believes,” “could,” “designed to,” “estimates,” “expects,” “forecasts,” “goal,” “intends,” “may,” “plans,” “possible,” “potential,” “seeks,” “will,” and variations of these words and phrases or similar expressions that are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding our business strategy for and the potential therapeutic benefits of our prospective product candidates, including AVR-RD-02 for the treatment of Gaucher disease; the anticipated benefits of the European Commission’s grant of orphan drug designation for AVR-RD-02; the design, commencement, enrollment and timing of ongoing or planned clinical trials and regulatory pathways; the timing of patient recruitment and enrollment activities, clinical trial results, and product approvals; the anticipated benefits of our gene therapy platform including the potential impact on our commercialization activities, timing and likelihood of success; the expected benefits and results of our implementation of the plato platform in our clinical trials and gene therapy programs; and the expected safety profile of our investigational gene therapies. Any such statements in this press release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Results in pre-clinical or early-stage clinical trials may not be indicative of results from later stage or larger scale clinical trials and do not ensure regulatory approval. You should not place undue reliance on these statements, or the scientific data presented.
Any forward-looking statements in this press release are based on AVROBIO’s current expectations, estimates and projections about our industry as well as management’s current beliefs and expectations of future events only as of today and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those set forth in or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the risk that any one or more of AVROBIO’s product candidates will not be successfully developed or commercialized; the risk of cessation or delay of any ongoing or planned clinical trials of
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