People with a rare throat disease may finally escape the surgery treadmill — the first DNA medicine just won US approval

Recurrent respiratory papillomatosis is a rare disease in which wart-like growths keep forming in the throat and airways, making breathing harder and straining the voice. The usual treatment is surgery to cut the growths away — but they grow back, so patients face operation after operation: in the group studied, a typical patient had already had 4.5 surgeries in a single year. A new treatment called Voceryq takes a different approach. It is made from small rings of DNA that teach the immune system to go after the two HPV types that cause the disease. In the study behind Friday's accelerated approval by the US Food and Drug Administration, 7 of the 26 patients who had needed the most surgery needed no operation at all in the year after treatment — and Voceryq is the first DNA medicine the FDA has ever approved. A larger follow-up trial still has to confirm the benefit, and the treatment is expected to reach patients within about two months.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation