Giving Him A Future..

3-month-old Riley’s £1.8m drug to fight gene disease

- Martin Bagot

A Baby has become one of the first to be given a potentially lifesaving drug on the NHS for a devastating spinal condition.

When he was three months old, the parents of Riley Cadle-Birch were told he had a severe form of spinal muscular atrophy, which causes progressive muscle weakness, loss of movement and difficulty breathing.

Without a new drug – thought to be the world’s most expensive – he faced a life expectancy of two years.

The Mirror reported last month how five-month-old Arthur Morgan became the first in England to get the pioneering gene therapy Zolgensma, costing £1.8million per dose.