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CNBC Advisory Board Member Dr. Anna Greca has built a career on discovering connections between various rare diseases. Greka, a professor at Harvard University and a physician at Massachusetts General Brigham, is also a member of the Broad Institute. In her lab, she oversees the Ladders to Cures Accelerator, an initiative aimed at accelerating the development of treatments for patients with rare diseases. It’s a model she hopes can attract more investment into the sector.
Greka and her team are working to identify where different rare diseases converge and share a single biological mechanism. Greca calls this approach “nodule biology.” By identifying areas where rare diseases overlap, Ladders to Cures hopes to develop new types of drugs that can be used to treat multiple diseases. By developing a single drug that can treat multiple diseases, those drugs can treat a much larger number of patients. That could make drugs more profitable, Greca says, which is key to creating an economically sustainable rare drug development model.
Greka has already shown that the node approach works. In 2019, she and her team published a paper outlining the mechanisms they discovered about a rare kidney disease that also plays a role in diseases that affect the eyes and brain. Greka hopes to use the Ladders to Cures Accelerator to discover more nodal connections and begin developing drugs that can treat them.
On October 27, the Broad Institute will host the 3rd Ladders to Healing Symposium. Greka will be attending along with colleagues Dr. David Liu, Dr. Winston Yang, and MIT economist Andrew Lo.
Ahead of the event, Becky Quick sat down with Greca to ask about the work being done at Ladders to Cures and the impact she hopes the accelerator can have on the rare community.
CNBC Cures is underwritten by AstraZeneca Rare Diseases Alexion.
