Bruce Goldsmith
Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is open.
Thanks very much for the question. So, in general, what we have seen is that the intra -- and I'll go to your Penn question in particular, but in general, what we've seen is that most of the sites that we are been interacting with, the COVID restrictions are starting to lift, the elective surgery interruptions that we saw really intensely last summer, and somewhat over the fall, have also started to lift. So, Penn for example, was not -- was going for a -- was going through a hybrid on site visit throughout the winter that is starting to lift as well. So, to your point, we have had difficulty, especially patients with frontotemporal dementia that have both severe speech aphasia and an emotional disturbance. Just on-site visits have been challenging, not particularly for us, but just we've heard from sites. So, we do hope that that's going to help alleviate things and Penn has allowed to our knowledge elective procedures as well as freed up now on-site visits, those two things have been very important for final assessments and moving forward with the ICM procedures. So great question and certainly been interrupted throughout the year. For GM -- for the other question on GM1 and Krabbe, yes, so it's a great and important question. There hasn't been, I think, so much read through on necessarily on the frontotemporal dementia, although we've certainly talked to our physicians about this. And one of the pieces of feedback we've heard is certainly very positive that ICM is safe in the pediatric patients. We've also seen at WORLD I think, up to around 20, or just over 20 procedures using ICM across various studies have been reported with no safety effects. We've been communicating that message as well. And that helps I think, from a frontotemporal dementia perspective, just knowing that ICM is gaining and traction, not only in the adult populations, but also pediatric. But the real read-through I think, has been in a Krabbe population. We've certainly been in touch with our investigators, but also, at the WORLD meeting spoke to a variety of groups that support from an advocacy perspective, the Krabbe community, and the, again, the ICM, the hu68, it's a lysosomal storage disease we're looking for treating children. And of course, the developmental gains are all perceived as extremely promising. So, we actually have seen quite a lot of positive feedback from the Krabbe community and hope that reads through to accelerating the study and getting patients on with therapy.