Dr. Vockley's Journey in Mitochondrial Disease Care

ENERGY IN ACTION - EPISODE 113

Dr. Vockley's Journey in Mitochondrial Disease Care

Dr. Jerry Vockley works everyday in the development and advancement of mitochondrial disease patient care. He is a Cleveland Family Endowed Chair in Pediatric Research, Professor of Pediatrics and Human Genetics, and Director of the Center for Rare Disease Therapy. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

What inspired your career in genetics and mitochondrial care?

I stumbled into genetics as an undergraduate and did undergrad research in genetics. My first job was also in genetics. I can't tell you precisely what triggered my interest in genetics, but it layered on and I can't imagine a different career. 

What is your research focus and goals for that research?

In clinical and medical genetics when I started in the field, there weren't the diagnostic advances we have now. The biggest advances came with the development of diagnostic technology. My focus is now on additional improvement and changes in technologies that have allowed us to move forward in therapy. Almost everything I do is therapy based. The area I'm excited about is that we're in the process of developing our first gene therapy for a fatty acid oxidation defect and we expect it'll be in clinical trials in a couple years. Fatty oxidation disorders didn't exist when I started my career because we didn't know about them. To go from not knowing about them to being able to cure them is powerful.

When you go into the lab and create experiments and conduct research, is it inspired by patients you see?

As an example of why we would do something like that, I once saw a 12 year old girl who had whole body psoriasis and physicians had only ever treated the psoriasis. I recognized that in addition to the rash, she was small for her age, had a small head size and she hadn't started showing any signs of sexual maturity. I suspected her case was more than just a rash and sent samples off to look for defects in steroid metabolism. Testing came back normal and so we went into the lab to look more broadly and identified a chemical that should have been there. We were able to confirm a gene that wasn't working and that led to us determining what the girl had and we were able to establish an effective treatment. 

LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED

International Network for Fatty Acid Oxidation Research and Management (INFORM) 

https://informnetwork.org/

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