At Denali Therapeutics, where I serve as chief medical officer and head of development, we are eager to develop new treatments for progressive and debilitating neuronopathic mucopolysaccharidoses diseases with our novel technology. We are not alone—several other biopharma companies also have drug candidates that have shown promise in clinical testing. Unfortunately, as so many families and physicians know, the road to approval of new treatments for rare diseases is long and slow.

A meeting convened by the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA on qualifying rare disease biomarkers for accelerated approvals could be an inflection point for patients with ultrarare diseases, their families, biotech companies, and FDA.

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The FDA will increasingly use accelerated approval for gene therapies aimed at rare conditions, according to Peter Marks, the FDA’s top official overseeing cell and gene therapies, the clearest signal yet of how widely the agency will deploy its expedited pathway.

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