New California stem cell chief stresses speed and efficiency in search for treatments

A major hope of those facing Huntington's disease (and numerous other diseases) resides in stem cell research.

The new president and CEO of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), transferring from the pharmaceutical industry, has assumed the helm of the $3 billion organization stressing efficiency, including a pledge to prioritize speedier development of treatments for the many diseases falling within the agency’s scope.

“What I promise I will do is to bring stem cell therapies and treatments to the patients that need them,” C. Randal Mills, Ph.D., chosen to run CIRM by its board of directors on April 30, said in San Diego on June 24 at the third of three “Meet the New CIRM President” events. “That is quite sincerely what I have done my entire career, and the only thing I care about and the only reason I came to CIRM.”

Dr. Mills was introduced by CIRM board chair Jonathan Thomas, J.D., Ph.D. The meeting took place in conjunction with the 2014 BIO International Convention, June 23-26, which showcased the work of leading biotech firms and featured a keynote speech by British business magnate Sir Richard Branson and a moderated Q & A with former Secretary of State and potential 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. The convention attracted more than 15,000 participants from all 50 states and 70 countries.

Dr. Mills outlined four questions he said will guide him in decision-making at CIRM.

First, he said, "is whatever we're doing speeding up a treatment reaching a patient?"

Secondly, will CIRM’s activities increase the likelihood of a treatment reaching a patient? There are many “valleys of death,” or dead ends, in stem cell research, Dr. Mills noted.

Third, is CIRM meeting an unmet medical need, as opposed to a condition already successfully dealt with by other medical means?

Fourth, is CIRM doing all this efficiently?

Randy Mills speaks to disease advocates and stem cell industry representatives in San Diego (photo by Gene Veritas).

Taking care of patients

Dr. Mills said his patient-oriented outlook started during his undergraduate studies in microbiology and cell studies at the University of Florida, in Gainesville.

“During that time I worked as a medic in the emergency room,” he told the audience. “I saw and dealt with a lot of patients and got a pretty good sense of what patient care was like and delivery was like.”

Dr. Mills obtained his Ph.D. in drug development, also at the University of Florida. After that, he worked for the university as a specialist in orthopedic transplants. With a partner, Jamie Grooms, he started a company within the university specializing in spinal fusion, one of the most common of orthopedic procedures.

In 1995, the two “spun out” the company from the university, calling it University of Florida Tissue Bank. That year the company had $1 million in revenues, with only six employees. Five years later, when the firm went public, it had 550 employees and annual revenues of $120 million.

“More importantly, (we were) producing regenerative medicine solutions for patients all across the United States on the scale of hundreds of thousands of implants, and better implants, a year,” Dr. Mills explained.

“It was during that time that I really learned a lesson. And the key lesson is: if you take care of patients, then your business is going to follow. If you don’t take care of the patients, there is nothing you can do in order to get your business to come along.”

Randy Mills (Osiris photo)

Key achievements at Osiris

In 2004, at the age of 32, Dr. Mills was recruited to become the president and CEO of Osiris Therapeutics, Inc., a Columbia, Md.-based company that commercialized the world’s first stem cell product, Osteocel, for bone regeneration. According to Mills, that product has brought a total of $1.5 billion in revenue to Osiris.

Under his leadership, in May 2012 Osiris received approval to market the world’s first systemically infused stem cell drug, Prochymal, which it developed to combat pediatric acute graft-versus-host disease. (It was approved in Canada but is also available in the U.S.; click here to read more.)

This condition occurs in patients receiving bone marrow transplants that reject the person and attack the body.

“Patients will literally peel out of their skin,” Dr. Mills said, describing the horrors of the condition. Patients with the condition have a life expectancy of only 87 days, he added.

With Prochymal, patients got better two-thirds of the time, he said.

Dr. Mills attributed Osiris’s success to its intense focus on patients.

“The board room is covered with pictures of our patients,” he said.

“That’s my mission with CIRM,” he continued. “We’re going to focus on the patients, and everything else is going to come along. If you get a sense of urgency from me, it’s because, if a life expectancy of a disease is 87 days, missing a month or two months or three months are actually real patients dying.”

Putting criticisms of CIRM in perspective

The stem cell board’s selection of a new CEO with long experience in the drug industry takes place a decade after California voters created CIRM by approving Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Act.

According to CIRM’s statistics, so far four clinical trials directly funded by the organization have taken place – including an observational study of Huntington’s disease patients at the University of California, Davis, the basis for a potential CIRM-supported treatment trial envisioned by Dr. Vicki Wheelock and Dr. Jan Nolta (click here to read more).

Six additional trials for different conditions are based on “discoveries made by our grantees when they were carrying out CIRM-funded research,” CIRM reports (click here to read more).

According to Kevin McCormack, CIRM’s senior director for public communications and patient advocate outreach, five more directly funded trials for various diseases will start by the end of 2014.

CIRM’s efforts have not yet produced a drug, although one or more treatments could arise from the clinical trials.

Some in California have criticized CIRM’s performance. The San Francisco Chronicle, for instance, editorialized that CIRM “hasn’t lived up to its hype” and has compiled a “decidedly mixed” record, although it recognized that California voters had “outsize expectations when they passed Prop. 71.”

The Chronicle further noted that “it’s been a struggle to get the agency to use the best organizational practices. In 2012, a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academy of Sciences released a report after a yearlong review that found conflicts of interest on the CIRM board that threatened to ‘undermine respect for its decisions.’ It also found significant flaws in the agency’s grant-approval process.”

The editorial added: “Progress on stem cell research has been significant – but it’s been the progress of the tortoise rather than the hare.”

In general, news coverage of CIRM has been sporadic. After all, news outlets typically don’t report on the work of scientists in the trenches.

In this blog, I have provided frequent coverage of HD science as well as related stem cell research. In my 15 years writing about HD science, I’ve learned that scientific progress is slow by nature. It’s not just the CIRM projects that take a long time to produce results.

From my standpoint, stem cell science has produced a “growing array of possibilities” for treatments and the “potential for a new era in human health,” as I noted after attending the 2013 World Stem Cell Summit (click here to read more).

Producing treatments is also extremely expensive. According to Jim Greenwood, president and CEO of the Biotechnology Industry Association, which organized the Bio Convention, developing a new drug in the U.S. costs an average of $1.2 billion. CIRM and/or its affiliated researchers will need to partner with the pharmaceutical industry to bring treatments to market.

In the HD community, we earnestly hope for stem cell treatments, but we’re also aware that a “cocktail” of different approaches (like gene therapy) will likely be needed to deal with the complexities of the disease. We’re rooting for all the researchers to find keys to treatments.

Crucial experience with clinical trials

With the need to show results, it’s not surprising the CIRM board chose a new CEO from the business world.

As noted by David Jensen, author of the blog California Stem Cell Report, CIRM’s previous two presidents, Zach Hall, Ph.D., and Alan Trounson, Ph.D., came from “largely academic and non-business backgrounds…. Decisions are likely to come faster under Mills.”

In his introduction of Dr. Mills at the San Diego meeting, CIRM board chair Dr. Thomas said that the new CEO met the many qualifications sought by the organization, including familiarity with the process of running stem cell clinical trials and seeking approval of drugs from governmental agencies.

“Very few people can say they’ve had more experience in clinical trials in stem cells,” Dr. Thomas said. “Very few people can say they’ve had more experience with the regulators, not just from the U.S., but from other countries as well.”

Randy Mills (left) and CIRM board chair Jonathan Thomas (CIRM photo)

The board also sought someone familiar with CIRM. Dr. Mills has spent the last five years as a reviewer of proposals made to CIRM by stem cell researchers seeking funding. (Click here to read more.)

During the audience Q & A, one woman asked Dr. Mills what he would do to make the grant review process more “transparent.”

Recognizing that the process wasn’t “perfect,” Dr. Mills nevertheless said he believed it was “pretty good” and already “remarkably transparent,” with world experts involved in the reviews. He reminded the audience that no “divining rod” exists to pick perfect projects. He added that he will work for quicker approval of worthy applications.

Keeping CIRM running

Jeanne Loring, Ph.D., a leading expert on stem cells and Parkinson’s disease at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, wanted to know how Dr. Mills would prioritize CIRM spending from now through 2017, when the last of the agency’s grants will be made and the original CIRM allocation of $3 billion might run out.

The agency still has about $600 million in uncommitted funds. In all, $1.5 billion of its $3 billion budget has yet to be spent, as many budgeted projects remain in progress.

“Let’s be careful on speculating on when CIRM is going to run out of money,” Dr. Mills said in response to Dr. Loring’s question. “That (2017) would be the absolute earliest. This is an important thing for people to understand: in order for that date to be true, things have gone incredibly well. Everything we funded, 100 percent of it, has worked. If that ‘17 date happens, I’m a happy guy, because we are rattling off diseases left and right.”

Dr. Mills explained that CIRM does “milestone-based funding.”

“So we’ll fund your project, but if you don’t hit your milestone, if it’s not working, we stop funding,” he continued. “That seems like a pretty good idea. So the projections on these running out of money is assuming that everything is going along. Everything’s going along, and we can’t get California to say, ‘Let’s keep doing it’? In a more practical sense, we’re not going to run out of money by then, and everything’s not going to work perfect. My job is to run CIRM as efficiently as we possibly can to develop treatments.”

According to spokesperson McCormack, the CIRM board can still redirect funding from the $1.5 billion as yet unspent. If a project comes in under budget, CIRM can also redirect savings to other projects, he added.

Some stem cell advocates such as Don Reed, who served on the executive board for the Prop 71 campaign, are already advocating a second round of CIRM funding to be requested from the state by way of another ballot proposition to be put before the voters. (You can watch Reed, HD advocate Judy Roberson, and children’s neurological disorders advocate Alex Richmond speak about their experiences by clicking here.)

Dr. Thomas has also spoken publicly about seeking private sources of funding for CIRM. In this vein, Dr. Mills’ experience in capital markets – one of the sought-for qualities in a CEO noted by Dr. Thomas – could prove helpful.

"California (undertook) a very important task in creating a funding stream for stem cell research," Clinton, referring to CIRM, said during her Q & A at the Bio Convention. "Other states have followed suit, when it looked as though the federal government would not be doing that. States have a role to play, but we need a national framework."

‘Our urgency for cures’

Huntington’s disease advocates participated in the “Meet the New CIRM President” events in San Diego as well as Los Angeles and San Francisco.

One of those participants, veteran advocate Frances Saldaña of Orange County, sees Dr. Mills’ appointment as a positive step.

“I really liked Randy Mills,” Saldaña, a mother of three children stricken with juvenile HD, told me in an e-mail about her encounter with Dr. Mills at the June 10 Los Angeles meeting. “I feel that he really understands our urgency to find cures.”

Saldaña’s daughter Margie Hayes – who became one of the very first HD patients to advocate for CIRM support for Huntington’s stem cell research when she spoke at a December 2007 CIRM board meeting – succumbed to the disease on February 7. Hayes had just turned 44. She is survived by her husband Craig and two teenaged children.

Saldaña’s husband also died of HD, which has afflicted several other members of her extended family. She was recently presented the 2014 Living Our Values Award by Michael Drake, the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), for her work in HD community service. Saldaña is the founder of HD-CARE, an Orange County care organization affiliated with UCI’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders.

Saldaña said of Dr. Mills: “In the case of HD families, he completely understands that we're in a race against time, as our families are dying.”

As mother Frances Saldaña (left) looks on, Margie Hayes tells about her struggle against HD at the CIRM Spotlight on Huntington's Disease, Los Angeles, December 12, 2007 (photo by Gene Veritas).

‘It’s really getting real’: payoffs in the effort to treat Huntington’s disease

The path to treating Huntington’s disease – a potential major breakthrough in the history of science and medicine – is becoming clearer.

That was the takeaway message from the Ninth Annual HD Therapeutics Conference, organized by the CHDI Foundation, Inc. and held February 24-27 at the Parker hotel in Palm Springs, CA. Spending tens of millions of dollars annually, CHDI is a non-profit, virtual biotech founded solely to discover HD treatments. Some 300 participants from academia, the pharmaceutical industry, and biotech firms took part, as well as a number of patient advocates, including Olympic rowing medalist Sarah Winckless, who delivered the keynote address.

“The tagline would have to be ‘it’s really getting real,’” said Robert Pacifici, Ph.D., the chief scientific officer for CHDI Management, Inc., in an interview with me at the conference. “What I’m seeing at this conference already is the culmination of very large, very long-term efforts – things that have taken years and thousands of person hours, patients’, caregivers’, researchers’, and physicians’ – finally coming together in ways that are really conclusive and really helpful.”

All that work has involved numerous questions about the disease and potential ways to treat it, Dr. Pacifici explained.

“All of those things sadly have an incredibly high attrition rate,” he observed. “The fact that we’re getting answers is the thing that makes me the most excited. Sadly, sometimes we don’t like the answer. Sometimes the answer is: ‘That doesn’t work.’ But that’s still very useful for researchers.”

Winnowing out the useless approaches allows researchers to “refocus our resources on something that we feel has a better chance of bearing fruit,” Dr. Pacifici said.

Sitting one evening with a group of CHDI researchers, I expressed the natural concern of the HD community – a concern sometimes tinged with impatience and frustration: could the rapidly expanding knowledge about HD result in an endless search for treatments fueled by questions that simply produce new questions rather than treatments?

They answered with an emphatic no. Echoing Dr. Pacifici, they said that real solutions were in the works.

The conference did seem more coherent in comparison with the previous three I had attended. Indeed, as one senior CHDI advisor observed in response to my observation, Huntington’s researchers now have an understandable “story to tell” about the disease and the research.

You can watch my interview with Dr. Pacifici in the video below. Just below the Pacifici interview, Portuguese speakers can watch my interview about the conference with Dr. Mônica Haddad of Brazil.

'It's Really Getting Real': Payoffs in the Effort to Treat Huntington's Disease from Gene Veritas on Vimeo.

A esperança de tratar a doença de Huntington: Dra. Mônica Haddad fala sobre a conferência da CHDI from Gene Veritas on Vimeo.

Confirming the shots on goal

Just three days before the conference, CHDI and Genzyme Corporation announced an agreement to jointly develop a “novel gene-silencing therapeutic for Huntington’s disease” using an adeno-associated virus, which does not cause disease, as a delivery system.

The venture expands CHDI and other research projects’ portfolio of potential treatments for HD, several of which are in the early stages of clinical trials or aim to begin trials soon.

In Dr. Pacifici’s words, the growing number of drug targets means there are more “shots on goal” in the quest for treatments.

CHDI is concentrating on “validating” (confirming) the targets to assure that as many potential remedies as possible have a chance of becoming effective, safe treatments, Dr. Pacifici explained.

“It’s important for any drug discovery organization, because when you select a target, that’s what underpins the rest of the (drug discovery) activity,” he said.

No organization has yet discovered how to validate targets “exactly,” he said. However, CHDI is especially working hard to insure that a “particular target is really tethered” to the HD disease process and not some other disease or process, he added.

“While nobody has the magic bullet there, it was really impressive to see the variety of approaches that were taken,” Dr. Pacifici said of the talks on target validation.

These included X. William Yang’s report on his latest research with transgenic HD mice, Ernest Fraenkel’s study of the impact of the mutant huntingtin gene at the molecular level, and CHDI scientist Jim Rosinski’s efforts to unify and interpret the totality of biological data on HD by employing a systems biology approach.

You can watch an excerpt from Dr. Fraenkel’s presentation, Dr. Rosinski’s full presentation, and most of the other talks by viewing my 2014 CHDI video album.

Finding a modifier gene, delaying onset

Jim Gusella, Ph.D., one of the lead discoverers of the HD gene in 1993, described the work of a large international team to find a so-called modifier gene, which might act as a trigger for the disease and affect the rate of progression.

Such a gene could also become the target of a treatment, Dr. Pacifici explained.

“Imagine coming up with a drug that can delay your age of onset by 30 years,” he said, referring to the wide variability in age of onset for people with the same degree of mutation. “That would be fabulous.”

The Gusella team’s search for the modifier gene points to “a couple of specific sites on human chromosomes,” Dr. Pacifici said. In contrast with the numerous studies done in mice and other organisms, this project “was generated with human data. So we don’t have to worry about the predictive value of those studies.”

Dr. Pacifici described the 20-year quest for the modifier gene as “a great example of how the community pulls together and the generosity of the families affects the progress of research. Without your blood, without your DNA sequences, without your permission, there’s no way these types of studies could be done.”

The team analyzed DNA from more than 4,000 HD gene carriers and affected individuals. The study also required the ongoing commitment of participants to allow researchers to track their symptoms.

“We need to make the correlation as to when the motoric age of onset (the start of involuntary movements) occurred,” Dr. Pacifici explained. “That’s invaluable and incredibly appreciated. Hopefully now people can understand why participation in trials like this leads to such exciting discoveries.”

New potential therapies

A session on “novel therapeutic approaches” focused on potential remedies different from the traditional concept of oral medication.

Jan Vesper, M.D., presented the promising results of his pilot trial using deep brain stimulation, which involves the placement in the brain of metal capsules covered with electrodes. Long-time HD specialist Gill Bates, Ph.D., discussed her new research on the muscle deterioration involved in HD mice and the potential use of a myostatin inhibitor to remedy the problem as well as perhaps ameliorate the involuntary movements typically suffered by patients.  Beth Stevens, Ph.D., explained the importance of restoring proper function of microglia (cells performing as the immune system of the nervous system) in pruning synapses, the connections between brain cells.

‘A horrible, lifelong case of jet lag’

Changes in people’s behavior could provide another way to ameliorate HD, Dr. Pacifici noted.

Along those lines, Christopher Colwell, Ph.D., presented critical new research on the circadian rhythm – our sleep clocks – and how its disrupted function in HD might worsen symptoms.

“Think of Huntington’s almost as a horrible, lifelong case of jet lag,” Dr. Pacifici said in describing the implications of Colwell’s and others’ work in this area. “By entraining (synchronizing) the clocks in your mind and the clocks in your various organs to stay in sync with each other – by using things like when you eat, when you go to sleep, when you exercise, what kind of light you’re exposed to – you could compensate for some of the mechanisms that go awry in Huntington’s disease. That type of regimen could be a therapy, or an add-on to a therapy, rather than something as traditional as a pill.”

Dr. Colwell’s engaging talk provided a wealth of ideas about the circadian rhythm and keeping it healthy. You can watch his presentation in the video below.

Circadian disruptions in Huntington's disease: mechanisms and possible treatment options from Gene Veritas on Vimeo.

Alpar Lazar, Ph.D., Stephen Morairty, Ph.D., and Tom Warner, Ph.D., provided additional evidence about the importance of the sleep cycle.

Assuring the drug does its job

In the session on “huntingtin lowering biomarkers,” several presenters described cutting-edge techniques for measuring the efficacy of potential therapies designed to attack HD at its genetic roots and reduce the effects of the mutant huntingtin protein. Those projects include the above-mentioned CHDI-Genzyme venture and the Isis-Roche-CHDI partnership.

“What you’d like to do is make sure that after you administer one of those drugs, that the drug has done its job,” Dr. Pacifici explained. “We don’t want to wait for five years to measure hundreds of people only to find out that the drug never did its primary job, which was to lower huntingtin levels.”

Along with an expert task force, CHDI has developed a series of ways to determine huntingtin-lowering efficacy in humans within a period of weeks, he said.

“Because we want to know what’s going on in the human brain, and we can’t go in there and take a little chunk of brain out every couple of weeks, we have to figure out a way of non-invasively making those measurements,” Dr. Pacifici continued.

The techniques include quantitative EEG (a kind of brain mapping), magnetic resonances pectroscopy, assessment of dysfunction in the mitochondria (the powerhouses of the cell), and measurement of huntingtin in bodily fluids such as cerebral spinal fluid.

Scientists are developing ways to measure other types of potential HD remedies such as phosphodiesterase inhibitors (aka “Viagra for the brain”).

As the HD field moves towards clinical trials, CHDI has increasingly emphasized the need for the exchange of information between scientists in the lab and physicians and others focused on patients and clinical trials, Dr. Pacifici commented. Such teamwork will enhance the possibility of finding treatments, he said.

Supporting Enroll-HD

The conference also featured several activities promoting Enroll-HD.

First announced in 2010 and officially launched in 2012, the CHDI-sponsored Enroll-HD is building a worldwide registry of HD patients, HD gene carriers, untested at-risk individuals, family members, and volunteers. It aims to facilitate scientific understanding of HD, identify potential participants in clinical trials, and therefore speed the process of finding therapies.

In a pre-conference meeting of Enroll-HD physicians and administrators on February 23, participants focused on ways to use the project to improve patient care. On February 24, Enroll-HD’s international steering committee met to discuss administrative matters.

On February 25, the CHDI conference featured a practical lunchtime session that provided an update on program details like the number of participants.

A ‘matchmaker’ facilitating clinical trials

In order to deepen understanding of Huntington’s, Enroll-HD looks at individual and family histories of HD “over a long period of time,” Joe Giuliano, CHDI’s director of clinical operations and the chief Enroll-HD administrator, said in an interview on February 24.

“The vision for Enroll-HD is to provide a clinical research platform that can be used by the community of HD researchers around the world to do clinical studies, and it can be used by pharmaceutical sponsors to do clinical trials,” Giuliano explained. “It’s an enabling tool to help answer important questions about Huntington’s disease using clinical research.”

Giuliano described the program’s three levels: the international administration, the wide range of sites based in local communities (run by physicians and other health workers), and the HD families.

“It starts with families,” Giuliano said. “Enroll-HD is really a study for all the family to participate in.

“Enroll-HD is a great opportunity for us to come together as a global research community. The clinical trials that are going to lead ultimately to new therapies for Huntington’s disease are going to be conducted in global clinical trials…. The more people we can get in Enroll-HD, the more powerful the study can become, for example, for recruiting for clinical trials. Enroll-HD can help identify participants … who are eligible for clinical trials.”

This potential makes Enroll-HD “very attractive” for pharmaceutical companies to collaborate with the program, Giuliano said.

Enroll-HD is a “matchmaker” putting together researchers, patients, drug companies, and others, he continued.

Anybody in the HD community can participate, including unaffected relatives of HD people. “By joining Enroll-HD, you’re being very proactive in a lot of different ways,” he said. “You’re providing the possibility that you may be eligible for a future clinical trial.”

The larger the pool of potential participants, the faster trials can take place, he concluded.

You can watch my interview with Giuliano in the video below.

For other coverage of the conference, visit www.HDBuzz.net.

Coming soon: a detailed report and more videos on Enroll-HD.

What is Enroll-HD? An interview with Joe Giuliano from Gene Veritas on Vimeo.

‘No Marine deserted on the battlefield’: two surviving spouses join forces to speed the defeat of Huntington’s disease

After the deadly, untreatable Huntington’s disease claimed their spouses, Jonathan Monkemeyer and Jane Mervar – once strangers, now close – decided to devote their lives to finding ways to speed the search for effective remedies and making the case for the importance of juvenile HD (JHD) in the process.

Without at first knowing the cause of his wife Sheryl’s strange illness, Jonathan quit his job in the early 2000s to become her full-time caregiver until she died from HD in 2009 at 46.

“It’s the thing you have to do,” Jonathan, an accomplished electrical engineer, said in a recent phone interview from his home in suburban Philadelphia. “You really don’t have a choice in our country. We did a lot of nice things, which was good. We did peaceful things like traveling to local gardens. She spent a lot of time with our son.”

Sheryl died at home. “I didn’t expect her to die,” Jonathan said. “I thought we would get the cure in time. The doctor said she had five years. But she fell and got hurt. She couldn’t sit. I had to hold her. Her weight went from 109 pounds to 89 pounds within four weeks. She died of a heart attack, which is like starving to death.”

Caring for Sheryl depleted the family’s life savings, Jonathan added. “I’m heating with wood right now,” he said. “I’m not using heating oil.”

The couple’s son Jonathan, now 14, has a 50-50 chance of having inherited the HD gene from his mother. (Usually only adults can decide whether to be tested for the gene, and most choose not to do so. Children can be tested if they already show symptoms.)

A parallel story

Halfway across the country in the village of L’Anse in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jane faced her own difficult odyssey to decipher the disease afflicting her family. She lost not only her 49-year-old husband Karl, but also her 13-year-old daughter Karli Mukka to HD, both in early 2010. (Jane gave her daughters her maiden name.)

“Karl was a wonderful, ambitious, intelligent man,” Jane said at the start of an exhausting and emotional four-hour interview. “He had very strong family values. He could always make me laugh.”

However, she recounted, gradually “he started to change. Nobody could explain to me what was going on.”

Karl Mervar and daughter Karli Mukka, both victims of HD (family photo)

Like many HD patients, Karl became angry and aggressive, threatening his family with violence.

“Karl held us hostage with his guns,” Jane said, recalling the dangers she, Karli, and her three other daughters faced as Karl’s behavior became increasingly irrational. “There were a lot of scary, scary times. We had a safe room in the house. We’d go in the room and push the bed up against the door. The girls knew this routine. Then I would try to play with him or try to distract him.

“The darn thing is, I knew we were everything left in the world that meant anything to him.”

JHD ravaged Karli’s body, displacing the organs in her chest cavity and forcing her spine to the far side. Because of the disease’s uncontrollable movements, Karli had chewed off half of her tongue by the time she died, Jane said.

A nurse suggested that Jane give Karli morphine and “let her go.” She declined the advice.

“It was a hard spot to be in,” Jane said. “I talked to Karli and asked her if she was ready to go on baby Jesus’s lap. She said no. She died of natural causes.”

Today Jane just gets by financially, thanks to Social Security benefits, as she cares full-time for her two other daughters with Karl, 22-year-old Erica Mukka and 20-year-old Jacey Mukka. Like Karli, both have JHD. Karisa Mukka, a 26-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, lives nearby.

Partners in love and advocacy

In June 2010, still in mourning for their lost loved ones, Facebook friends Jonathan and Jane struck up a lively conversation while sitting next to each other at the 25^th convention of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA) in Raleigh, NC. After the convention, they spoke daily for at least a couple of hours. Jonathan visited L’Anse, and shortly thereafter Jane and Jacey stayed nine days with the Monkemeyers.

Their friendship led Jonathan and Jane into a romantic, long-distance relationship.

“They’re an incredible family,” Jonathan said of Jane and her daughters. “Their value system is not about themselves.”

“I was in a pretty low place,” Jane recalled. “I had lots of grief after Karli and Karl died. I wanted a reprieve from caregiving – just wanted to be dead. I’d be laughing after I finished talking to Jonathan. I think he saved me.”

Their relationship and support for each other’s families also became a partnership in advocacy for HD patients.

Bridging the gaps

To achieve their goals, Jonathan and Jane are politely but firmly challenging bureaucratic inertia.

Supporting himself and his son with his son’s Social Security survivor benefits, Jonathan dedicates himself full-time to HD advocacy. He has developed a deep understanding of HD science. By his account, he has so far skimmed through more than 10,000 scientific articles related to the disease.

Applying an engineering approach to the problem of developing treatments, Jonathan developed a website, HDCircle.org, currently offline, on which he has posted information about HD researchers from around the world, links to HD organizations, and reviews of potential HD treatments. He plans to reactivate the site soon.

He also created a Facebook discussion page, Hereditary Disease Circle, with the goal of finding connections between HD and other neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, posttraumatic stress disorder, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In addition, he attends relevant meetings and conferences in order to network with people from other disease communities. He seeks to bring their best results and ideas to bear on HD research.

As Jonathan explained, he aims to create “synergies” and “bridge the gaps” among HD researchers and the various key organizations such as HDSA, the Hereditary Disease Foundation (HDF), the CHDI FoundationInc., the multi-million-dollar, non-profit virtual biotech formed solely to seek HD treatments, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

As one example, Jonathan said he has spoken personally with NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, one of the pioneers in the search for the HD gene in the 1980s and 1990s, more than a dozen times, including last week in Washington, D.C.

NIH Director Francis Collins (left) and Jonathan Monkemeyer (personal photo)

“Essentially, engineers design things hierarchically,” Jonathan explained. “I created a website, which is a blueprint for how the system works.

“We’re the only disease without a gene therapy. There have been 1,000 gene therapy clinical trials. But we as a community don’t seem to be organized enough. There’s something in our organizational structure. By their very nature of having a job description, when you’re within an organization, your function is to be in the organization. Everybody gets stuck in a silo of what they’re doing. With so many scientists and stakeholders in the field of HD research, moving forward gets stymied by committee and the sense of urgency gets tuned out.”

If he held a position within one of the organizations, “I’d have a boss to report to,” Jonathan continued. “As an outsider, without a job, and asking questions as an advocate, it gives you the position to help steer people in the right direction towards what needs to be done. I have the greatest freedom, not being employed in an organization. I can talk to anybody I want to.”

Sometimes Jonathan feels as if he’s “walking on egg shells, because I’m not a researcher,” he said. “You tell people very nicely and very artfully. We don’t tear down institutions. We build them up.”

He summed up his approach as “doing what needs to be done to drive innovation that will bring a therapeutic to our community.”

What might work

Significantly, Jonathan’s efforts include canvassing the research community for the latest discoveries and techniques that could translate into therapies for HD. He seeks to brainstorm about new developments, as well as previous ones, in his conversations with scientists.

Rather than simply await for the multi-million-dollar pharmaceutical efforts to bring results, advocates must actively participate in the search for treatments, perhaps even trying drugs and substances approved for other purposes in their own off-label studies, seeking advice from researchers on dosing, and having people reporting their observations via a website, Jonathan suggested.

He cited the example of Hannah’s Hope Fund (HHF), whose advocates teamed with researchers in a low-cost effort to develop gene therapy for a rare genetic condition known as giant axonal neuropathy. HHF has met with the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and, if a safety study goes as planned, could start a clinical trial this year.

In the drug-discovery system in America, the profit motive “stymies innovation and responsibility” towards the patients, Jonathan observed. Rather than producing strong leaders like a Jonas Salk, who developed the vaccine for polio, the system today fosters a climate of “let’s make everybody happy.”

Jonathan also pointed to the new partnership between the NIH and the Milken Institute/Faster Cures, which seeks to increase collaboration among the government, foundations, universities, and the pharmaceutical industry in order to cure more diseases and do it faster. This initiative includes the creation of a new NIH program, the National Center for AdvancingTranslational Sciences.

Advocates for rare diseases like HD need “to get involved in every single aspect” of the search for treatments.

“AIDS advocates made the FDA bend,” he noted. “We the patients have a moral incentive. Our voice counts and makes the difference.”

An epiphany about JHD

Like other JHD advocates, Jane and Jonathan have strived to increase the attention to JHD by researchers, HD organizations, and the government.

In September 2010, Jonathan and Jane met with Dr. Steve Groft, the director of the Office of Rare Diseases Research at the NIH, to press the case for greater support for HD research.

For Jonathan and Jane, the meeting was a kind of epiphany. Pointing to the different emphases and the existence of different organizations in the field of diabetes and juvenile diabetes, Groft helped them see the key role that JHD research could play in the overall HD effort.

Dr. Steve Groft and Jane Mervar. In the middle is Max the Turtle, Karli’s stuffed animal companion that is now a mascot of the JHDKids initiative (family photo).

“The meeting was phenomenal,” Jane said. Jonathan said she came away with a greater sense of “we need to do something.”

“Everybody was so resistant to acknowledge the juvenile population,” Jane said. “It’s just like some big political game. Nobody was playing that game for our children, so we were screaming: we need a cure, we need a cure, we need a cure!”

“You need a piece of legislation to get JHD funded, and then the NIH would fund it,” Jonathan explained, pointing to one of the roadblocks facing the efforts to understand and treat JHD.

Both Jonathan and Jane observed that JHD research lags far behind other HD research, and, because of ethical concerns and the need to avoid mixing juvenile and adult research data, children aren’t included in clinical trials.

Jane tried but failed to sign up Karli for a trial for ACR-16, seen as a potentially promising HD remedy. Jane described the formal response she received as “too bad for you, you have Juvenile HD.” “I was devastated,” she said.

Karli also took the supplement creatine, currently under study for HD and taken by many in the community. “It took us almost a year to get two doctors to follow Karli when she was on creatine and to get a guideline on dosage,” Jane recalled. “There are a lot of families that are just slipping through the cracks.”

Researchers have also lacked a so-called “natural history study” of JHD – a study to follow a group of patients over an extended period to better understand the condition and support the development of treatments.

Jane and Jonathan’s advocacy has included pressing the HD organizations to pay greater attention to JHD, they said. Thanks to pressure from JHD families, last year HDSA agreed to the creation of a new fundraising effort specifically for JHD, Jane explained.

“Great things can be created from hard situations,” Jane observed.

Jonathan and Jane at the White House after their meeting at the NIH Office of Rare Diseases and Research (family photo)

Raising the profile of JHD

Jane, her daughters, and other JHD families swung into action, joining other grassroots JHD initiatives in the effort to raise awareness and funds for research.

Jacey and Erica started JHDKids.com. With a computer and video equipment provided by the Make-a-Wish Foundation, Jacey has made a series of short films, including one about Karl and Karli titled The Real Huntington’s Disease, which has had more than 220,000 views on YouTube. (Watch the video below.)

The JHDKids initiative is seeking funds specifically to support the JHD research of Dr. Jane Paulsen, the co-director of the HDSA Center of Excellence at the University of Iowa, and project partner Dr. Martha Nance, the director of the HDSA Center of Excellence in Minneapolis.

Both researchers work on a volunteer basis, with all funds raised going solely to research.

In the words of the JHDKids site, JHD differs significantly from adult onset HD in several ways. “The most significant difference is that in JHD the disease occurs before the brain is fully developed,” says a statement on the site from the researchers. “This accounts for the wide variation at one age from JHD to another age. Maturation and neurodegeneration occur at the same time in JHD.”

Drs. Paulsen and Nance began following JHD patients at the annual HDSA conventions in order to carry out the natural history study.

“Now, with the awareness and fundraising getting more widespread, they’re able to bring our families into Iowa,” Jane explained. “We’re planning on going this spring. That will be the first time we’re going to Iowa.”

One big family

Jonathan and Jane have talked of bringing their families together in one place.

For now, however, they will continue their hours-long daily conversations from their respective abodes. Jonathan’s location on the East Coast facilitates his access to the corridors of scientific and medical power, while Jane wants to respect Jacey’s wish to die in the same place as her sister and father.

The distance does not diminish their commitment to each other’s families, nor to the larger cause.

Jonathan helps Jane manage her caregiving crises. “He’s always learning something new,” she said. “He’s a very faithful, spiritual person. He’s just a very good man.”

Erica and Jacey’s doctors wouldn’t predict how long they might live, although JHD patients typically die in their 20s or 30s, if not sooner, like Karli.

Jane knows that an effective, life-saving treatment might not come in time to save them. She concentrates on providing them with the healthiest, happiest life possible. Having worked as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home and seen Karl go through his final decline in such a home, she hopes to keep her girls at home as long as possible.

“Jacey has a big phobia that if she can’t see me, she’ll die,” Jane said. “We can’t calm that down. She likes to watch movies. She likes to work on the website. She likes to see all the kids with JHD. She likes to come up with new ideas for designing the website.”

At 19, Erica had married her high school sweetheart, but the marriage lasted only 11 months. She is currently dating another man. “She wants him to learn how to do her makeup and coordinate her clothing,” said Jane, who has legal guardianship over both daughters.

She obtained a court order to obtain permission for a tubal ligation for Erica.

“I cried with her,” Jane said. “It was just a real painful process to go through. She said, ‘If I had a baby and got sicker, and what if my baby’s like Karli?’”

“Fear for my son is certainly a reason,” said Jonathan of his commitment to the HD cause, noting that, so far, his son has showed no HD symptoms. “That’s a personal, selfish motivation. Why is my son’s life more important than someone else’s life? I know Jacey and Erica and everybody else that’s dying from this.”

He added, “I’m doing this full time, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more important I can do with my life. It’s knowing everybody in the community and knowing the suffering and the damage it causes to families. You don’t leave a marine in the battlefield. It’s just wrong to walk away. I can’t stop doing it. This is my life experience.”

His experiences as Sheryl’s caregiver have deepened his feelings about others facing the same plight.

“When I see HD in somebody else, the empathy is much more intense and overwhelming,” he confided. “To me, we’re all a big family. That’s why I can’t walk away.”