Pompe disease: Unmet needs and emerging therapies

Pompe disease is a debilitating and life-threatening disease caused by aberrant accumulation of glycogen resulting from reduced acid alpha-glucosidase activity. The first treatment for Pompe disease, the enzyme replacement therapy, Myozyme® (recombinant human acid alpha-glucosidase, alglucosidase alfa), is a lifesaving treatment for the most severe form of the disease and provided clinically meaningful benefits to patients with milder phenotypes. Nonetheless, many patients display suboptimal responses or clinical decline following years of alglucosidase alfa treatment. The approval of avalglucosidase alfa (Nexviazyme®) and cipaglucosidase alfa (Pombiliti®) with miglustat (Opfolda®) represents a new generation of enzyme replacement therapies seeking to further improve patient outcomes beyond alglucosidase alfa. However, the emergence of a complicated new phenotype with central nervous system involvement following long-term treatment, coupled with known and anticipated unmet needs of patients receiving enzyme replacement therapy, has prompted development of innovative new treatments.

This review provides an overview of the challenges of existing treatments and a summary of emerging therapies currently in preclinical or clinical development for Pompe disease and related lysosomal storage disorders. Key treatments include tissue-targeted enzyme replacement therapy, which seeks to enhance enzyme concentration in target tissues such as the central nervous system; substrate reduction therapy, which reduces intracellular glycogen concentrations via novel mechanisms; and gene therapy, which may restore endogenous production of deficient acid alpha-glucosidase. Each of these proposed treatments shows promise as a future therapeutic option to improve quality of life in Pompe disease by more efficiently treating the underlying cause of disease progression: glycogen accumulation.