July 5, 2023 – LSU Health New Orleans today announced that Takeda has exercised its option to receive an exclusive license to certain early-stage technology designed to slow the progression of DNA repeat expansion disorders.
In DNA repeat expansion disorders, a segment of repeated DNA expands within a gene to cause disease. The repeated DNA sequence itself continues to grow over time like a tumor. Ed Grabczyk, PhD, Professor of Genetics at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, discovered a potential way to slow or stop this continued growth by targeting a DNA mismatch repair protein believed to be responsible for DNA repeat expansion.
“Imagine that you have a ticking time bomb within your body that will go off in the future and destroy you,” explains Dr. Grabczyk. “That is essentially the situation faced by people who inherit a gene carrying a DNA repeat expansion. Our approach targets a central mechanism that is shared by all repeat expansion diseases.”