Progress in Fighting Rare Diseases
1 IN 10
AMERICANS
are affected by rare diseases
7,000
rare diseases
are known to exist today
95%
of rare diseases
do not have approved trearments
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Progress & Unmet Need

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Spurring Innovation
The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) has been instrumental to increasing research into rare diseases. Since the enactment of ODA in 1983, more than 770 orphan drugs and biological products have been approved in the U.S., compared with just 10 in the decade before passage.
The ODA provides incentives for rare disease R&D, as it can be especially challenging to develop new treatments for rare diseases. These incentives include an exclusive right to market the drug for the orphan indication for seven years upon U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.
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Challenges in Rare Disease Drug Development
Developing medicines to treat rare diseases presents scientific and operational challenges. The complex biology of many rare diseases presents unique hurdles for scientists, making it difficult to design and implement a drug development program. Within a particular rare disease, there can be many variations or subtypes resulting in different clinical manifestations and disease progressions. Additionally, due to the inherently small population of patients with a rare disease, recruiting for and conducting clinical trials can be difficult.
Despite these challenges, America’s biopharmaceutical researchers have leveraged new technologies and the growing scientific understanding of many rare diseases to develop groundbreaking therapies in recent years, including:
- The first treatments directed at treating the underlying causes of cystic fibrosis
- Significant advances in targeted therapies for many forms of blood cancer, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia, chronic myelogenous leukemia, and multiple myeloma
- New medicines that can prevent or slow the impact of several extremely rare, devastating conditions including pulmonary arterial hypertension, hereditary angioedema, and Gaucher disease
- The first therapies available to treat many rare pediatric diseases, including a progressive, metabolic disease called hypophosphatasia (HPP), an inherited genetic disease called lysosomal acid lipase (LAL) deficiency, and neuroblastoma, a rare form of cancer that occurs in nerve cells and the brain