Saving Ryan

Ryan Dant was one of only 40 babies in the U.S. born each year with a condition called Mucopolysacharidosis, or MPS-1, part of a family of genetic diseases in which the patient is missing an enzyme necessary for the body to function properly. The condition is nearly always fatal.

Ryan's parents, Mark and Jeanne Dant, were told they could do little more than wait for their boy to die. But the Dants were unwilling to accept that. So Mark Dant went to work.

Ryan was born in 1988. From what his parents could see, he was a healthy, active toddler. Mark was on the police force and Jeanne worked in the airline industry. Together, they were building a quiet, peaceful life in the suburbs of Dallas. In 1991, when Ryan turned 3, a physician noticed that his liver was abnormally large.

There wasn't much research on the disease, because so few people got it. The Dants decided to look for a cure themselves. The Dants started the Ryan Foundation to help fund a cure. It became a community project with all their neighbors joining the fight. Their first fundraiser was a bakesale. They netted $342.

Meanwhile, Ryan's health continued to decline. His headaches became so excruciating, he would vomit and pass out. His fingers started to curl. When Ryan's hands got too stiff, it affected his ability to play his favorite sport - baseball. To keep him in the game, his father attached velcro to his bat. Eventually, even that didn't work, and Ryan had to quit the team.

Mark still worked full time as both a cop and as Ryan's dad. Every day after walking the beat, he changed his uniform to knock on doors and shake hands. Over three years, the Ryan Foundation graduated from bake sales to $100,000 olf tournaments with Ryan as the poster child.

Says Mark: "Every time I walked into a corporation or a company or a store, I would show them a picture of Ryan and I would say, I'm here not as a police officer, I'm here as a dad. And here is my cause. And I'd show them a picture. If I went to a hundred places, 99 would still say no, but one would say yes, and that was a big day."

In 1995, Mark met a young scientist at UCLA named Emil Kakkis. Kakkis was one of the few researchers in the world studying MPS1 - and his meeting with Mark couldn't have come at a better time. He was about to stop research for lack of money.

Kakkis had a sense that this complicated disease had a fairly simple solution: Create a synthetic version of the enzyme that's missing in kids who have MPS1.

The science was solid. But to take his synthetic enzyme from the lab to the bedside, Kakkis needed money. Over the next few years, the Ryan Foundation raised a million dollars and gave it all to Emil Kakkis.

Within three years, Kakkis had attracted additional funding from a small biotech firm and had gotten FDA approval for a clinical trial of his synthetic enzyme treatment. Ten kids were chosen for the trial at Harbor/UCLA hospital in California. Ryan was one of them.

Two months before Ryan's 10th birthday, Kakkis and the Dants administered the first dose of Ryan's enzyme treatment. Week by week, Ryan's life improved. Now at age 13, Ryan is back playing baseball.

"It feels like I can do everything that I ever wanted to, like ride my bike every day or play baseball, basketball, you name it, I can do it," he says.

All 10 kids showed improvement. Three years after that first trial, Ryan still receives the enzyme treatment once a week at a Dallas hospital.

The drug still hasn't been approved for general use. The FDA is requiring a second clinical trial with a larger sample - one with 42 kids worldwide.

The early success of Kakkis's enzyme treatment has encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to invest in these rare, genetic diseases. Right now there are a number of companies working on potential treatments for at least four other MPS-related disorders.

June 2002: Update:

Mark Dant says Ryan just keeps getting better. He's 14 now, still playing baseball, and dreams of becoming a major league umpire. Mark has raised over half a million dollars more for MPS-1 research. And although Ryan and the Holland children are all doing remarkably well, the FDA has still not approved the enzyme replacement treatment. The families hope it will be approved early next year.

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