Harrington Discovery Institute Scientific Symposium 2023

May 31, 2023

In May 2023 the 10th Annual Harrington Discovery Institute Scientific Symposium took place in Cleveland, Ohio and featured some ground-breaking talks from a rare diseases perspective. Harrington Discovery Institute (Harrington) funds, supports and advises clinician scientists turning promising scientific breakthroughs into therapies to treat diseases.

As Rare Disease is one of Harrington’s focuses, the Scientific Symposium provided updates on several therapeutic development programmes for rare diseases. These included Harrington Scholar-Innovators developing therapies for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Huntington’s Disease and other repeat expansion disorders. Excitingly, Takeda has recently exercised its option to receive an exclusive license to early-stage technology designed to slow the progression of DNA repeat expansion disorders.

Encouragingly, recipients of the 2023 Harrington Scholar-Innovator Award include rare disease scholars focusing on novel therapies for antiphospholipid syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder; a fatal teenage-onset epilepsy called Lafora disease; pancreatic cancer and personalised therapies for epileptic encephalopathies.

Working closely with Harrington’s expertise in therapeutic development for rare diseases, the Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre is committed to delivering much needed new therapies for patients with rare diseases.