Transcript
Introduction
Rick
Our teacher today is giving sight to the blind. And no, I'm not talking about Jesus Christ, although he's always most welcome in our classroom. I'm talking about Jeff Marrazzo, Cofounder and former CEO of Spark Therapeutics, the biotech company that under Jeff's leadership was the very first in history to receive FDA approval for a gene therapy.
They did so with the drug LUXTURNA to treat inherited retinal disease. Unlike any treatment that came before it, LUXTURNA is a onetime gene therapy that has the potential to actually restore the visual cycle, the process that allows you to see. It's hard to overstate how revolutionary this breakthrough was not just for patients suffering from various IRDs but for the entire biotech complex as Spark has helped to ignite and expand the art of what's possible and how we will seek to treat and potentially cure hundreds of genetic conditions over the coming decades.