News

Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the site of a first-of-its-kind clinical trial in Batten disease, has dedicated its lobby in honor of the Charlotte and Gwenyth Gray Foundation to Cure Batten Disease. Touted as one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive pediatric academic medical centers, the hospital is in…

RaDaR, the catchy new name for the U.S. government-run Rare Diseases Registry Program, aims to help patient advocacy groups with limited resources build their own disease registries. The site was developed by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a division of the National Institutes of…

With 250 rare diseases newly identified every year, scientists can barely keep up — even as the healthcare system fails millions of Americans whose rare diseases have already been diagnosed. That’s the warning from Christopher P. Austin, MD, director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Studies (NCATS) at…

The CLN3 gene may play a more crucial role than previously thought in the normal balance of cellular recycling processes and the degradation of important fatty molecules in nervous brain cells, a study suggests. The study titled, “Lysosomal proteome analysis reveals that CLN3-defective cells have multiple enzyme deficiencies…

Patients experiencing typical symptoms of late-infantile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (LINCL) should be tested for the presence of genetic defects in CLN5 and CLN8, a study says. The findings of the study, “The Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinoses-Linked Loss of Function CLN5 and CLN8 Variants Disrupt Normal Lysosomal Function,” were published…