Aug 27, 2026 · 39 min · 15 segments
Guillain-Barré syndrome is a rare, rapidly progressive autoimmune disorder in which harmful inflammation attacks peripheral nerves, potentially causing acute paralysis, respiratory failure, and…
Doug LoveGuestDaniel LevineHostWell, how is the condition typically treated today, and how do these treatments work?
Uh, so G-Guillain-Barré syndrome was discovered actually one hundred and ten years ago this year.
Um, we, we really are doing a lot of work with the patient advocacy groups and others around the world, uh, frankly, to bring more attention to this disease because after a hundred and ten years, there are no approved therapies, targeted therapies for GBS, um, in the United States.
So it's treated with that as a standard care or plasma exchange where you're actually bringing in plasma cells to try and stop this inflammatory process.
Um, neither have been studied in randomized clinical studies, and so you don't know their true treatment effect.
But given the devastating nature of the disease, you have to do something to, to try and stop it.
And then there's significant risk for mortality, which really is related to the severity of your disease and your age.
We know if you are sixty-five years old or older, you have a twenty-five percent, uh, risk for mortality.
I mean, that's a higher risk than you see with d- diseases like, you know, ischemic stroke or something or another.
If you are on a ventilator, you have a one in four likelihood of, of mortality in, you know, within a year of being on the ventilator.
And this is on top of the current standard of care treatments, uh, that are out there.
They're doing the best they can do, but they're incomplete, and importantly, they're nonspecific in shutting down this entire inflammatory process, which is really, really important to stopping this disease.
As I said, GBS, eight out of ten times strikes a person who is otherwise completely healthy.
Well, how is the condition typically treated today, and how do these treatments work?
Uh, so G-Guillain-Barré syndrome was discovered actually one hundred and ten years ago this year.
Um, we, we really are doing a lot of work with the patient advocacy groups and others around the world, uh, frankly, to bring more attention to this disease because after a hundred and ten years, there are no approved therapies, targeted therapies for GBS, um, in the United States.
So it's treated with that as a standard care or plasma exchange where you're actually bringing in plasma cells to try and stop this inflammatory process.
Um, neither have been studied in randomized clinical studies, and so you don't know their true treatment effect.
But given the devastating nature of the disease, you have to do something to, to try and stop it.
And then there's significant risk for mortality, which really is related to the severity of your disease and your age.
We know if you are sixty-five years old or older, you have a twenty-five percent, uh, risk for mortality.
I mean, that's a higher risk than you see with d- diseases like, you know, ischemic stroke or something or another.
If you are on a ventilator, you have a one in four likelihood of, of mortality in, you know, within a year of being on the ventilator.
And this is on top of the current standard of care treatments, uh, that are out there.
They're doing the best they can do, but they're incomplete, and importantly, they're nonspecific in shutting down this entire inflammatory process, which is really, really important to stopping this disease.
As I said, GBS, eight out of ten times strikes a person who is otherwise completely healthy.
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