Let’s Chat About … RARE-X with Karmen Trzupek
Through global data sharing and analysis, the nonprofit RARE-X (the research arm of Global Genes) is working to accelerate treatments for rare diseases, including Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA) and other rare inherited retinal diseases (IRDs).
Hope in Focus featured Karmen Trzupek, RARE-X’s Senior Director of Scientific Programs, in its webinar episode “Let’s Chat About…RARE-X.’ Our Director of Outreach and Development Courtney Coates discussed with Karmen RARE-X’s mission and goals, and its recent merger with Global Genes. The March 7, 2023, session can be viewed here.
“Let’s Chat About…” is our free webinar series bringing together researchers, advocates, industry leaders, and people living with LCA and other rare IRDs for conversations important to the rare retinal disease community.
RARE-X and its founding
Nicole Boice founded Global Genes to support patients, families, and patient advocacy groups dedicated to rare diseases. At Global Genes, Nicole and others recognized a tremendous need to solve data collection and sharing problems for patient communities affected by rare diseases, and founded RARE-X to address those critical data issues
Rare disease patients’ data often is collected somewhere and sits privately in a silo where it is inaccessible to others. Or, the patient community actively manages the data in a format precious to a particular researcher, but unhelpful to others. Or, the data doesn’t exist, as is the case with many rare diseases.
RARE-X began addressing these issues through its data collection platform that enables rare disease communities to start gathering data in a highly structured and streamlined way that aligns with existing research philosophies.
“We work very hard at RARE-X to make sure that every single question asked of patients and families is a valid data point,” Karmen said. “Then we also share that data. With patient permission, all the data collected on the platform gets migrated to a data-analysis platform, and any qualified researcher can access that data.”
Collecting the data
“When someone first comes onto the RARE-X platform and starts entering data, it will ask them for their self-reported diagnosis. Do you have a genetic test? It asks about symptoms and the progression of those symptoms over time.
“We have people upload a copy of their genetic test results for the genetic testing data. Then we have a genetic curation team that reviews those, pulls out that data and makes sure that that data is in discrete data points. That’s useful to researchers because a researcher coming onto the platform does not want to pour through a whole bunch of PDFs and sometimes pictures from somebody’s phone of their test results, so we curate all of that data and make sure that that’s available on the research portal.”
Collaborations through RARE-X
Karmen develops programming and strategic collaborations to ensure the company makes the best use of the data that patients and families entrust to them.
In one program, she’s managing an “Open Science Data Challenge” with data from about 30 patient advocacy groups in the pediatric neurodevelopmental space, in collaboration with families of children with disorders causing seizures and global developmental delays.
“We are pulling the data and aligning it with other partner data, and then making it widely available to an extensive research community under a challenging environment, like a hackathon, to try to generate valuable insights and create research proposals for grants.”
Karmen also is looking at how RARE-X develops partnerships for additional data sources and uses of the data that circle back to benefit the patient community. Other groups on the platform include some adult-onset neurodegenerative disorders and some inherited retinal disorders.
“Usher syndrome, for example, that community is actively collecting data on the platform. And then other related inherited ocular conditions that aren’t retinal but share overlapping issues and needs, like Leber hereditary optic neuropathy, are collecting data.”
The company also plans to make digital optical coherence tomography (OCT) data available side-by-side with patient reported data.
“Those images are proprietary to the software and the hardware used. Multiple companies make OCTs, and we’re working with an artificial intelligence group that has developed ways to bring that data together and make it cross-comparative.”
RARE-X plans future LCA community data collection
“The platform has been live for about a year and a half, and we are very much building this plane as we fly it,” she said. “We’re working in the vision consortium to ensure that we’re adding the right kinds of surveys and patient-reported outcome measures to the platform that are most useful to this patient community.
“We’re continuing to talk with Hope in Focus and other groups within the LCA family of diseases. As soon as we start to have some more vision-specific surveys, we’ll begin collecting data pretty actively.”
From genetic counselor to RARE-X’s mission
Karmen’s career began as a genetic counselor in inherited retinal diseases. She worked at the Casey Eye Institute and then InformedDNA, where she developed ways to share the experience and information received by patients and families seen at a major academic research center with patients and families unable to physically get to a major center. Telemedicine and collaborations and partnerships with local retinal specialists accomplished much of that.
But she realized a much greater need overall for rare disease information sharing and for funding. Through the Usher Syndrome Coalition, Karmen met Nicole and Charlene, the RARE-X founders.
“I loved the mission and that they’re enabling even the smallest patient groups to start becoming very actively involved in clinical research,” she said.
“They are flipping that paradigm where a patient community doesn’t have to wait for a clinical trial or a natural history study for their data to be valuable. But flipping where the patient communities drive the research agenda and begin to say, ‘look, we have the data, and we have started to de-risk this disease as a disease that would be valuable to pharma to invest in.’ I love that paradigm shift. I love getting to be part of that.”
Merger benefits the rare disease community
“Coming together and joining Global Genes helps the entire journey of the patient advocate. If you think about a rare disease patient or parent, you start on your diagnostic journey searching for the diagnosis, right?
“You get that diagnosis, and maybe a patient foundation or community already exists. Maybe not, if it’s an ultra-rare disease. Those patients and families going through that have lots of needs. Those questions might include: Where do I go from here? How do I best support my child in the school system?
“The patient-advocacy journey is something that Global Genes, for a long time, has been very involved in. RARE-X has been developing this platform and developing partnerships to use this data, and now we can provide an extension of that patient advocate journey.
“So much of what both Global Genes and RARE-X have been doing is related to how we educate and support patient advocates in becoming more active participants in research and helping to drive that research agenda. I think there was a lot of overlap that was beginning to develop there. It made sense to merge.”
The future for RARE-X
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved therapy for a rare neurologic disorder, and for the first time, it accepted
data from an ongoing natural history study as essentially a control arm.
“That brought up a lot of excitement and questions around patient-generated data because the patient community drove that natural history study. RARE-X and Global Genes have an opportunity to be part of this story and its evolution,” Karmen said.
“Now I am not suggesting that clinical data and traditional natural history studies will be replaced. There’s so much value in those studies, but we also know that they only ever capture a small percentage of the patient community who can travel.
“How can we make that kind of research more broadly available to a much larger population of patients and find something that’s a little bit more hybrid? That is a massive part of where I see us going in the next five years.”