First gene therapy human trial in the United States for a form of muscular dystrophy under way

The clinical trial for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) tests the safety and effectiveness of a therapy that was developed over two decades by scientists at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's School of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh.

The trial was launched March 28, at Columbus Children's Hospital in Ohio, an affiliate of Ohio State University's School of Medicine. In the trial, six boys with DMD will receive replacement genes for an essential muscle protein.

Each of the boys will receive replacement genes via injection into a bicep of one arm and a placebo in the other arm. Neither the investigators nor the participants will know which muscle got the genes. After several weeks, an analysis of the injected muscle tissue's microscopic appearance, as well as extensive testing of the health and strength of the trial participants, will reveal whether gene therapy for DMD is likely to be safe and whether it's likely to result in persistent production of the essential protein in muscle cells.

Muscular dystrophies are genetic disorders characterized by progressive muscle wasting and weakness that begin with microscopic changes in the muscle. As muscles degenerate over time, the person's muscle strength declines.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a genetic disease that begins in early childhood, causes progressive loss of muscle strength and bulk, and usually leads to death in the 20s from respiratory or cardiac muscle failure. DMD occurs when a gene on the X chromosome fails to make the essential muscle protein dystrophin. One of nine types of muscular dystrophy, DMD primarily affects boys.

Currently, the best medical therapy can only slow the progressive muscle weakness of DMD.

The gene for dystrophin is one of the largest genes in the human body, and miniaturizing it, while retaining the crucial elements of its set of DNA instructions, has been among the greatest challenges to the gene therapy field.

The new Biostrophin therapy uses a novel combination of advanced technologies, including a miniaturized replacement dystrophin gene and nano delivery technology called biological nanoparticles. Developed from a virus known as adeno-associated virus (AAV), the nanoparticles are engineered specifically to target and carry the "minidystrophin" gene to muscle cells.

The therapy was made possible by the pioneering research in AAV by Dr. Richard Jude Samulski, professor of pharmacology and director of the Gene Therapy Center at UNC, and Dr. Xiao Xiao, a former UNC postdoctoral researcher in Samulski's laboratory now with the University of Pittsburgh Human Gene Therapy Center and associate professor of orthopedic surgery.

Samulski has long pioneered methodologies for making viruses deliver genes. As a graduate student at the University of Florida in the early 1980s, his thesis project was developing the AAV as a vector for therapeutic genes. This work eventually led to isolation of type-2 AAV, which has been used for gene therapy trials in cystic fibrosis and in several other settings, Samulski said.