Empowered Patient Podcast Developing Essential Tremor and Other CNS Therapies with Marcio Souza Praxis Precision Medicines
Marcio Souza, President and CEO of Praxis Precision Medicines, discusses the challenges in treating central nervous system disorders and is focused on developing life-altering treatments for patients with essential tremor. Current treatments for epilepsy are often broad-based and not specific to the underlying cause of the disease. Praxis is using insights about genetic epilepsy to understand the underlying imbalances in the brain and develop a precision medicine approach to improve movement disorders.
Marcio explains, "For example, we have four clinical programs right now, four different molecules in the clinic, and many more to come in the future, but four at this given point in time. And one of them is for a very common movement disorder called the essential tremor, which is very common, about 2% of the US population develop this condition. And there is no real understanding of where it comes from. Incredibly debilitating for all the people living with essential tremor. But when you take a step back, and you look into the network, it overlaps with a lot of our understanding of epilepsy."
"Other times, we just start in epilepsy, and we end in epilepsy. And I think that’s good as well because there is a huge need for better drugs in epilepsy as well. So we’re using that as a gateway to either better drugs for epilepsy or new drugs in the case of certain types of epilepsy that don’t have any drugs or any treatment available at all. Or to branch out and really understand more mechanistically how to help other diseases. And we think it’s only the beginning. There’s a lot more to be done there."
#PraxisMedicines #EssentialTremor #NeurologicalDiseases #MovementDisorder #FirstinClassMechanism #AtHomeTrial