Active clinical trials for "Giant Axonal Neuropathy"

Title: Intrathecal Administration of scAAV9/JeT-GAN for the Treatment of Giant Axonal Neuropathy Background: - The Gigaxonin gene lets the body make a protein chemical called Gigaxonin. Nerves need Gigaxonin to work properly. Giant Axonal Neuropathy (GAN) causes a shortage of functional Gigaxonin. Nerves stop working normally in people with GAN. This causes problems with walking and sometimes with eating, breathing, and many other activities. GAN has no cure. Over time, GAN can shorten a person s life. Researchers want to see if a gene transfer treatment may help people with GAN. Objectives: - To see if a gene transfer is safe and shows potential to help people with GAN. Eligibility: - People age 3 and older with GAN. Design: For 1 month following gene transfer participants must live full-time within 100 miles of the NIH. Participants will be screened by phone and in person. They will take many tests. Some are listed below. Their medical records will be reviewed. Their caregivers may be contacted. Participants will have a total of about 27 visits, weekly, monthly, and then yearly over 15 years. They will include many of the tests below. Physical and nervous system exams. Blood, urine, and stool samples. Nerve, lung, heart, and eye tests. Questionnaires. MRI scans, nerve biopsies, and spinal taps. Participants will be sedated for some tests. Speech, memory, muscle, and mobility tests. Skin biopsy (small sample removed). Participants will take many medicines. Some require intravenous lines. Participants will get the gene transfer through an injection by spinal tap into their cerebrospinal fluid, which flows around the brain and spinal cord. The genes are packed in a modified virus that carries the genes to cells in their body. Participants safety is not guaranteed.

Giant Axonal Neuropathy (GAN) is a devastating and rare childhood disease. Children with GAN develop increasing muscle weakness, impaired sensation, and at times mental retardation. GAN starts in infancy, leads to significant disability, and typically leads to death within the first 30 years of life. GAN is caused by a defect in the "gigaxonin" (GAN) gene, resulting in pathologically enlarged and dysfunctional nerves. Currently, there is no effective therapy. To find out what medications can help patients with GAN, the investigators have to conduct clinical trials. In this study, the investigators propose to prepare for future clinical trials and will invite GAN patients to join our research effort. The investigators will examine them regularly to better understand their disease. The visits will include questions, a physical exam, blood drawing, a lumbar puncture, and a skin biopsy. The visits will also include tests that assess the electrical conductivity of the patients' nerves as well as a test to measure the patients' brain wave activity. In addition, the investigators will be performing tests to evaluate the patients' motor function, their vision, and thinking ability. Identifying an effective GAN treatment is very important because there is currently none. Clinical trials are the only way to decide whether a new treatment works in GAN patients or not. With the future objective of conducting clinical trials in GAN, the proposed project has three specific aims. The first is to plan for clinical trials by developing reliable outcome measures, and establishing the infrastructure needed to carry out efficient clinical trials. The second is to further characterize the patient population from a clinical and molecular point of view, and the third aim is to utilize the information gathered in this study to further pre-clinical GAN drug development to select candidate drugs.