When doctors couldn’t stop her daughter’s seizures, this mom earned a PhD and found a treatment herself.
Savannah Salazar (left) and her mother, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar, who earned a PhD in neurobiology in the quest for a treatment of her daughter's seizure disorder.
Twenty-eight years ago, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar woke to the sound of her daughter, two-year-old Savannah, in the midst of a medical emergency.
“I entered [Savannah’s room] to see her tiny little body jerking about violently in her bed,” Tracy said in an interview. “I thought she was choking.” When she and her husband frantically called 911, the paramedic told them it was likely that Savannah had had a seizure—a term neither Tracy nor her husband had ever heard before.
Over the next several years, Savannah’s seizures continued and worsened. By age five Savannah was having seizures dozens of times each day, and her parents noticed significant developmental delays. Savannah was unable to use the restroom and functioned more like a toddler than a five-year-old.
Doctors were mystified: Tracy and her husband had no family history of seizures, and there was no event—such as an injury or infection—that could have caused them. Doctors were also confused as to why Savannah’s seizures were happening so frequently despite trying different seizure medications.
Doctors eventually diagnosed Savannah with Lennox-Gaustaut Syndrome, or LGS, an epilepsy disorder with no cure and a poor prognosis. People with LGS are often resistant to several kinds of anti-seizure medications, and often suffer from developmental delays and behavioral problems. People with LGS also have a higher chance of injury as well as a higher chance of sudden unexpected death (SUDEP) due to the frequent seizures. In about 70 percent of cases, LGS has an identifiable cause such as a brain injury or genetic syndrome. In about 30 percent of cases, however, the cause is unknown.
Watching her daughter struggle through repeated seizures was devastating to Tracy and the rest of the family.
“This disease, it comes into your life. It’s uninvited. It’s unannounced and it takes over every aspect of your daily life,” said Tracy in an interview with Today.com. “Plus it’s attacking the thing that is most precious to you—your kid.”
Desperate to find some answers, Tracy began combing the medical literature for information about epilepsy and LGS. She enrolled in college courses to better understand the papers she was reading.
“Ironically, I thought I needed to go to college to take English classes to understand these papers—but soon learned it wasn’t English classes I needed, It was science,” Tracy said. When she took her first college science course, Tracy says, she “fell in love with the subject.”
Tracy was now a caregiver to Savannah, who continued to have hundreds of seizures a month, as well as a full-time student, studying late into the night and while her kids were at school, using classwork as “an outlet for the pain.”
“I couldn’t help my daughter,” Tracy said. “Studying was something I could do.”
Twelve years later, Tracy had earned a PhD in neurobiology.
After her post-doctoral training, Tracy started working at a lab that explored the genetics of epilepsy. Savannah’s doctors hadn’t found a genetic cause for her seizures, so Tracy decided to sequence her genome again to check for other abnormalities—and what she found was life-changing.
Tracy discovered that Savannah had a calcium channel mutation, meaning that too much calcium was passing through Savannah’s neural pathways, leading to seizures. The information made sense to Tracy: Anti-seizure medications often leech calcium from a person’s bones. When doctors had prescribed Savannah calcium supplements in the past to counteract these effects, her seizures had gotten worse every time she took the medication. Tracy took her discovery to Savannah’s doctor, who agreed to prescribe her a calcium blocker.
The change in Savannah was almost immediate.
Within two weeks, Savannah’s seizures had decreased by 95 percent. Once on a daily seven-drug regimen, she was soon weaned to just four, and then three. Amazingly, Tracy started to notice changes in Savannah’s personality and development, too.
“She just exploded in her personality and her talking and her walking and her potty training and oh my gosh she is just so sassy,” Tracy said in an interview.
Since starting the calcium blocker eleven years ago, Savannah has continued to make enormous strides. Though still unable to read or write, Savannah enjoys puzzles and social media. She’s “obsessed” with boys, says Tracy. And while Tracy suspects she’ll never be able to live independently, she and her daughter can now share more “normal” moments—something she never anticipated at the start of Savannah’s journey with LGS. While preparing for an event, Savannah helped Tracy get ready.
“We picked out a dress and it was the first time in our lives that we did something normal as a mother and a daughter,” she said. “It was pretty cool.”
Hand-counting bacteriophage plaques during a titer test.
In my hometown of Pittsburgh, it is not uncommon to read about cutting-edge medical breakthroughs, because Pittsburgh is the home of many innovations in medical science, from the polio vaccine to pioneering organ transplantation. However, medical headlines from Pittsburgh last November weren't heralding a new discovery for once. They were carrying a plea—for a virus.
Phages are weapons of bacterial destruction, but despite recognition of their therapeutic potential for over 100 years, there are zero phage products commercially available to medicine in the United States.
Specifically, a bacteria-killing virus that could attack and control a certain highly drug-resistant bacterial infection ravaging the newly transplanted lungs of a 25-year-old woman named Mallory Smith. The culprit bacteria, Burkholderia cepacia, is a notoriously vicious bacterium that preys on patients with cystic fibrosis who, throughout their life, are exposed to course after course of antibiotics, often fostering a population of highly resistant bacteria that can become too formidable for modern medicine to combat.
What Smith and her physicians desperately needed was a tool that would move beyond failed courses of antibiotics. What they sought was called a bacteriophage. These are naturally occurring ubiquitous viruses that target not humans, but bacteria. The world literally teems with "phages" and one cannot take a bite or drink of anything without encountering them. These weapons of bacterial destruction are exquisitely evolved to target bacteria and, as such, are not harmful to humans. However, despite recognition of their therapeutic potential for over 100 years, there are zero bacteriophage products commercially available to medicine in the United States, at a time when antibiotic resistance is arguably our most pressing public health crisis. Just this week, a new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences detailing the global scope of the problem.
Why Were These Promising Tools Forgotten?
Phages weren't always relegated to this status. In fact, in the early 20th century phages could be found on American drug store shelves and were used for a variety of ailments. However, the path-breaking discovery and development of antimicrobials agents such as the sulfa drugs and, later the antibiotic penicillin, supplanted the world of phage therapeutics in the United States and many other places.
Fortunately, phage therapy never fully disappeared, and research and clinical use continued in Eastern European nations such as Georgia and Poland.
The antibiotic age revolutionized medicine in a way that arguably no other innovation has. Not only did antibiotics tame many once-deadly infectious diseases, but they made much of modern medicine – from cancer chemotherapy to organ transplantation to joint replacement – possible. Antibiotics, unlike the exquisitely evolved bacteriophage, possessed a broader spectrum of activity and were active against a range of bacteria. This non-specificity facilitated antibiotic use without the need for a specific diagnosis. A physician does not need to know the specific bacterial genus and species causing, for example, a skin infection or pneumonia, but can select an antibiotic that covers the likely culprits and use it empirically, fully expecting the infection to be controlled. Unfortunately, this non-specificity engendered the overuse of antibiotics whose consequences we are now suffering. A bacteriophage, on the other hand, will work against one specific bacterial species and is evolved for just that role.
Phages to the Rescue
As the march of antibiotic resistance has predictably continued since the dawn of the antibiotic age, the prospect of resurrecting phage therapy has been increasingly viewed as one solution. Fortunately, phage therapy never fully disappeared, and research and clinical use continued in Eastern European nations such as Georgia and Poland. However, much of that experience has remained opaque to the medical community at large and questions about dosage, toxicity, efficacy, and method of delivery left many questions without full answers.
Though real questions remained regarding phage use, dire circumstances of prolific antibiotic resistance necessitated their use in the U.S. in two prominent instances involving life-threatening infections. The first case involved an Acinetobacter baumanii infection of the pancreas in a San Diego man in which phages were administered intravenously in 2016. The other case, also in 2016, involved the instillation of phages, fished out of a pond, into the chest cavity of man with a Pseudmonas aeruginosa infection of a prosthetic graft of the aorta. Both cases were successful and were what fueled the Pittsburgh-based plea for Burkholderia phages.
The phages you begin with may not be the ones you end up with, as Darwinian evolutionary pressures will alter the phage in order to keep up with the ongoing evolution of its bacterial target.
How Phages Differ from Other Medical Products
It might seem surprising that in light of the urgent need for new treatments for drug-resistant infections, the pharmaceutical armamentarium is not teeming with phages like a backyard pond. However, phages have been difficult to fit into the current regulatory framework that operates in most developed countries such as the U.S. because of their unique characteristics.
Phages are not one homogenous product like a tablet of penicillin, but a cocktail of viruses that change and evolve as they replicate. The phages you begin with may not be the ones you end up with, as Darwinian evolutionary pressures will alter the phage in order to keep up with the ongoing evolution of its bacterial target. The cocktail may not just contain one specific phage, but a range of phages that all target some specific bacteria in order to increase efficacy. These phage cocktails might also need adjusting to keep pace with bacterial resistance. Additionally, the concentration of phage in a human body after administration is not so easy to predict as phage numbers will rise and fall based on the number of target bacteria that are present.
All of these characteristics make phages very unique when viewed through a regulatory lens, and necessitate the creation of new methods to evaluate them, given that regulatory approval is required. Using phages in the U.S. now requires FDA permission through an investigational new drug application, which can be expedited during an emergency situation. FDA scientists are actively involved in understanding the best means to evaluate bacteriophage therapy and several companies are in early-stage development, though no major clinical trials in the U.S. are currently underway.
One FDA-approved application of phages has seen them used on food products at delis and even in slaughterhouses to diminish the quantity of bacteria on certain meat products.
Would That Humans Were As Lucky As Bologna
Because of the regulatory difficulties with human-use approval, some phage companies have taken another route to develop phage products: food safety. Food safety is a major public health endeavor, and keeping food that people consume safe from E.coli, Listeria, and Salmonella, for example, are rightfully major priorities of industry. One FDA-approved application of phages has seen them used on food products at delis and even in slaughterhouses to diminish the quantity of bacteria on certain meat products.
This use, unlike that for human therapeutic purposes, has found success with regulators: phages, not surprisingly, have been granted the "generally regarded as safe (GRAS)" designation.
A Phage Directory
Tragically Mallory Smith succumbed to her infection despite getting a dose of phages culled from sludge in the Philippines and Fiji. However, her death and last-minute crusade to obtain phages has prompted the call for a phage directory. This directory could catalog the various phages being studied and the particular bacteria they target. Such a searchable index will facilitate the rapid identification and – hopefully – delivery of phages to patients.
If phage therapy is to move from a last-ditch emergency measure to a routine tool for infectious disease physicians, it will be essential that the hurdles they face are eliminated.
Moving Beyond Antibiotics
As we move increasingly toward a post-antibiotic age in infectious disease, moving outside of the traditional paradigm of broad-spectrum antibiotics to non-traditional therapeutics such as bacteriophages and other novel products will become increasingly necessary. Already, clinical trials are underway in various populations, including a major trial in European burn patients.
It is important to understand that there are important scientific and therapeutic questions regarding dose, route of administration and other related questions that need to be addressed before phage use becomes more routine, and it is only through clinical trials conducted with the hope of eventual commercialization that these answers will be found. If phage therapy is to move from a last-ditch emergency measure to a routine tool for infectious disease physicians, it will be essential that the hurdles they face are eliminated.
Dr. Adalja is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. He has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate's section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine. He is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine. Follow him on Twitter: @AmeshAA
Digital blockchain concept.
The hacker collective known as the Dark Overlord first surfaced in June 2016, when it advertised more than 600,000 patient files from three U.S. healthcare organizations for sale on the dark web. The group, which also attempted to extort ransom from its victims, soon offered another 9 million records pilfered from health insurance companies and provider networks across the country.
Since 2009, federal regulators have counted nearly 5,000 major data breaches in the United States alone, affecting some 260 million individuals.
Last October, apparently seeking publicity as well as cash, the hackers stole a trove of potentially scandalous data from a celebrity plastic surgery clinic in London—including photos of in-progress genitalia- and breast-enhancement surgeries. "We have TBs [terabytes] of this shit. Databases, names, everything," a gang representative told a reporter. "There are some royal families in here."
Bandits like these are prowling healthcare's digital highways in growing numbers. Since 2009, federal regulators have counted nearly 5,000 major data breaches in the United States alone, affecting some 260 million individuals. Although hacker incidents represent less than 20 percent of the total breaches, they account for almost 80 percent of the affected patients. Such attacks expose patients to potential blackmail or identity theft, enable criminals to commit medical fraud or file false tax returns, and may even allow hostile state actors to sabotage electric grids or other infrastructure by e-mailing employees malware disguised as medical notices. According to the consulting agency Accenture, data theft will cost the healthcare industry $305 billion between 2015 and 2019, with annual totals doubling from $40 billion to $80 billion.
Blockchain could put patients in control of their own data, empowering them to access, share, and even sell their medical information as they see fit.
One possible solution to this crisis involves radically retooling the way healthcare data is stored and shared—by using blockchain, the still-emerging information technology that underlies cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And blockchain-enabled IT systems, boosters say, could do much more than prevent the theft of medical data. Such networks could revolutionize healthcare delivery on many levels, creating efficiencies that would reduce medical errors, improve coordination between providers, drive down costs, and give researchers unprecedented insights into patterns of disease. Perhaps most transformative, blockchain could put patients in control of their own data, empowering them to access, share, and even sell their medical information as they see fit. Widespread adoption could result in "a new kind of healthcare economy, in which data and services are quantifiable and exchangeable, with strong guarantees around both the security and privacy of sensitive information," wrote W. Brian Smith, chief scientist of healthcare-blockchain startup PokitDok, in a recent white paper.
Around the world, entrepreneurs, corporations, and government agencies are hopping aboard the blockchain train. A survey by the IBM Institute for Business Value, released in late 2016, found that 16 percent of healthcare executives in 16 countries planned to begin implementing some form of the technology in the coming year; 90 percent planned to launch a pilot program in the next two years. In 2017, Estonia became the first country to switch its medical-records system to a blockchain-based framework. Great Britain and Dubai are exploring a similar move. Yet in countries with more fragmented health systems, most notably the U.S., the challenges remain formidable. Some of the most advanced healthcare applications envisioned for blockchain, moreover, raise technological and ethical questions whose answers may not arrive anytime soon.
By creating a detailed, comprehensive, and immutable timeline of medical transactions, blockchain-based recordkeeping could help providers gauge a patient's long-term health patterns in a way that's never before been possible.
What Exactly Is Blockchain, Anyway?
To understand the buzz around blockchain, it's necessary to grasp (at least loosely) how the technology works. Ordinary digital recordkeeping systems rely on a central administrator that acts as gatekeeper to a treasury of data; if you can sneak past the guard, you can often gain access to the entire hoard, and your intrusion may go undetected indefinitely. Blockchain, by contrast, employs a network of synchronized, replicated databases. Information is scattered among these nodes, rather than on a single server, and is exchanged through encrypted, peer-to-peer pathways. Each transaction is visible to every computer on the network, and must be approved by a majority in order to be successfully completed. Each batch of transactions, or "block," is date- and time-stamped, marked with the user's identity, and given a cryptographic code, which is posted to every node. These blocks form a "chain," preserved in an electronic ledger, that can be read by all users but can't be edited. Any unauthorized access, or attempt at tampering, can be quickly neutralized by these overlapping safeguards. Even if a hacker managed to break into the system, penetrating deeply would be extraordinarily difficult.
Because blockchain technology shares transaction records throughout a network, it could eliminate communication bottlenecks between different components of the healthcare system (primary care physicians, specialists, nurses, and so on). And because blockchain-based systems are designed to incorporate programs known as "smart contracts," which automate functions previously requiring human intervention, they could reduce dangerous slipups as well as tedious and costly paperwork. For example, when a patient gets a checkup, sees a specialist, and fills a prescription, all these actions could be automatically recorded on his or her electronic health record (EHR), checked for errors, submitted for billing, and entered on insurance claims—which could be adjudicated and reimbursed automatically as well. "Blockchain has the potential to remove a lot of intermediaries from existing workflows, whether digital or nondigital," says Kamaljit Behera, an industry analyst for the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.
The possible upsides don't end there. By creating a detailed, comprehensive, and immutable timeline of medical transactions, blockchain-based recordkeeping could help providers gauge a patient's long-term health patterns in a way that's never before been possible. In addition to data entered by their caregivers, individuals could use app-based technologies or wearables to transmit other information to their records, such as diet, exercise, and sleep patterns, adding new depth to their medical portraits.
Many experts expect healthcare blockchain to take root more slowly in the U.S. than in nations with government-run national health services.
Smart contracts could also allow patients to specify who has access to their data. "If you get an MRI and want your orthopedist to see it, you can add him to your network instead of carrying a CD into his office," explains Andrew Lippman, associate director of the MIT Media Lab, who helped create a prototype healthcare blockchain system called MedRec that's currently being tested at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. "Or you might make a smart contract to allow your son or daughter to access your healthcare records if something happens to you." Another option: permitting researchers to analyze your data for scientific purposes, whether anonymously or with your name attached.
The Recent History, and Looking Ahead
Over the past two years, a crowd of startups has begun vying for a piece of the emerging healthcare blockchain market. Some, like PokitDok and Atlanta-based Patientory, plan to mint proprietary cryptocurrencies, which investors can buy in lieu of stock, medical providers may earn as a reward for achieving better outcomes, and patients might score for meeting wellness goals or participating in clinical trials. (Patientory's initial coin offering, or ICO, raised more than $7 million in three days.) Several fledgling healthcare-blockchain companies have found powerful corporate partners: Intel for Silicon Valley's PokitDok, Kaiser Permanente for Patientory, Philips for Los Angeles-based Gem Health. At least one established provider network, Change Healthcare, is developing blockchain-based systems of its own. Two months ago, Change launched what it calls the first "enterprise-scale" blockchain network in U.S. healthcare—a system to track insurance claim submissions and remittances.
No one, however, has set a roll-out date for a full-blown, blockchain-based EHR system in this country. "We have yet to see anything move from the pilot phase to some kind of production status," says Debbie Bucci, an IT architect in the federal government's Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Indeed, many experts expect healthcare blockchain to take root more slowly here than in nations with government-run national health services. In America, a typical patient may have dealings with a family doctor who keeps everything on paper, an assortment of hospitals that use different EHR systems, and an insurer whose system for processing claims is separate from that of the healthcare providers. To help bridge these gaps, a consortium called the Hyperledger Healthcare Working Group (which includes many of the leading players in the field) is developing standard protocols for blockchain interoperability and other functions. Adding to the complexity is the federal Health Insurance and Portability Act (HIPAA), which governs who can access patient data and under what circumstances. "Healthcare blockchain is in a very nascent stage," says Behera. "Coming up with regulations and other guidelines, and achieving large-scale implementation, will take some time."
The ethical implications of buying and selling personal genomic data in an electronic marketplace are doubtless open to debate.
How long? Behera, like other analysts, estimates that relatively simple applications, such as revenue-cycle management systems, could become commonplace in the next five years. More ambitious efforts might reach fruition in a decade or so. But once the infrastructure for healthcare blockchain is fully established, its uses could go far beyond keeping better EHRs.
A handful of scientists and entrepreneurs are already working to develop one visionary application: managing genomic data. Last month, Harvard University geneticist George Church—one of the most influential figures in his discipline—launched a business called Nebula Genomics. It aims to set up an exchange in which individuals can use "Neptune tokens" to purchase DNA sequencing, which will be stored in the company's blockchain-based system; research groups will be able to pay clients for their data using the same cryptocurrency. Luna DNA, founded by a team of biotech veterans in San Diego, plans a similar service, as does a Moscow-based startup called the Zenome Project.
Hossein Rahnama, CEO of the mobile-tech company Flybits and director of research at the Ryerson Centre for Cloud and Context-Aware Computing in Toronto, envisions a more personalized way of sharing genomic data via blockchain. His firm is working with a U.S. insurance company to develop a service that would allow clients in their 20s and 30s to connect with people in their 70s or 80s with similar genomes. The young clients would learn how the elders' lifestyle choices had influenced their health, so that they could modify their own habits accordingly. "It's intergenerational wisdom-sharing," explains Rahnama, who is 38. "I would actually pay to be a part of that network."
The ethical implications of buying and selling personal genomic data in an electronic marketplace are doubtless open to debate. Such commerce could greatly expand the pool of subjects for research in many areas of medicine, enabling the kinds of breakthroughs that only Big Data can provide. Yet it could also lead millions to surrender the most private information of all—the secrets of their cells—to buyers with less benign intentions. The Dark Overlord, one might argue, could not hope for a more satisfying victory.
These scenarios, however, are pure conjecture. After the first web page was posted, in 1991, Lippman observes, "a whole universe developed that you couldn't have imagined on Day 1." The same, he adds, is likely true for healthcare blockchain. "Our vision is to make medical records useful for you and for society, and to give you more control over your own identity. Time will tell."