Given everything he’s been through, Bobby Wiseman says he should have been dead instead of celebrating the birth of his first grandchild several days ago.
Wiseman, 51, who lives near Sacramento, was diagnosed as an infant with hemophilia, the rare genetic disease that prevents blood from clotting. He tested positive for HIV and hepatitis C when he was 11 after catching the viruses from contaminated blood-clotting products. As a teenager, he spent 45 days hospitalized in a coma from massive gastrointestinal bleeding.
But Wiseman’s HIV is undetectable now because of medication he takes monthly. His hepatitis, he said, was cured by another breakthrough drug. Perhaps most remarkably, he hasn’t had to regularly inject a protein to make his blood clot since 2018. That’s when he became the first patient in a study to receive an experimental gene therapy for his form of the bleeding disorder, hemophilia B. The one-time intravenous infusion was developed by UniQure, a Dutch biotech with operations in Lexington.
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