Soon A Cure

WBZ's Jordan Rich says Huntington's Disease may soon be curable.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Upside with Jordan the dose of good news,
because it's a big world out there. It's a neurodegenerative
condition that progressively worsens over time. It's called Huntington's disease,
the condition that took the life of the famous folk
singer Woody Guthrie, among so many others. But here's the
good news. While there's no way to prevent it from occurring,
a team of scientists at University College in London have

(00:22):
been laboring intensively trying to find a cure, and they
think they're getting close. The cure coming in the form
of a type of gene therapy called AMT one thirty.
How this works. It delivers corrective genetic material directly into
the brain, and it's done so via surgery, which can
take up to eighteen hours. But the results from this
one time surgical treatment are meant to last a lifetime.

(00:43):
Preliminary trials a group of twenty nine patients, and the
news is good. The treatment reduced disease progression by seventy
five percent over three years, and FDA approval will hopefully
happen in the first quarter of the next year. Good
news in the health front and that's the upside with
Jordan wz Boston's news is Radio