Sangamo’s gene therapy product candidate for Fabry disease shows continued tolerability and promise as an alternative to Enzyme Replacement Therapy

In this podcast, we talked with Nathalie Dubois-Stringfellow, Senior Vice President of Product Development and Management at Sangamo about Sangamo’s work in gene therapy and the latest data on Sangamo’s gene therapy product candidate for Fabry disease. I began the interview by asking Nathalie if she could talk about Sangamo and the company’s pipeline. She explained that Sangamo is a genomic medicine company dedicated to translating groundbreaking science into medicine. Their technology includes gene therapy, genome editing, and cell therapy. Their zinc finger nucleus platform allows them to edit genes either by adding genes, deleting genes, repairing mutation, repressing the expression of the gene, or activating. It is a vast area of technology that they can apply to a variety of diseases. Using their breakthrough technology, they were the first to edit human genes, treat patients with gene edited T cells, treat patients with in vivo genome editing, and treat patients with engineered T cells. Our current clinical focus is on Fabry disease, a rare genetic disease and Hemophilia A sickle cell disease. She then described their recent clinical data on ST-920, a gene therapy product candidate for Fabry disease, that continues to be generally well-tolerated and presents sustained α-Gal A activity based on data from nine patients. She said that they were extremely excited about the result of this Phase I-II clinical trial. Fabry disease is an inherited disorder that is caused by mutation of the galactosidase alpha (GLA) genes which leads to deficient alpha-galactosidase A (α-Gal A) enzyme activity. This enzyme normally breaks down a fatty substance called globotriaosylceramide and without this enzyme this fatty substance builds up in the cells throughout the body, particularly in the skin, kidneys, heart, and nervous system. The current standard of care for Fabry disease is an intravenous infusion of the missing enzyme, the treatment being called enzyme replacement therapy or ERT. This provides a high concentration of the missing enzyme for a very short time and the treatment has to be repeated in those patient every two weeks. It's a very cumbersome infusion that can take several hours and typically needs to be done in the hospital, thus negatively impacting patient quality of life. Sangamo’s approach is a one-time therapy treatment where the gene for the missing enzyme is delivered to the liver cells of the patient, which are then acting as cell factory for producing the missing enzyme. Please listen to our full interview using the player above or download on the player using Apple podcasts, Spotify or More.