Dr. Hal Dietz

Dr. Dietz, geneticist and investigator at Johns Hopkins shares promising data for people with Loeys-Dietz syndrome at the 2010 Loeys-Dietz Syndrome Foundation conference in Baltimore. He credits the advances to research that has been done for over 20 years in Marfan syndrome, a related disorder. He then links that to what we are beginning to know about Loeys-Dietz syndrome, and what that means for medical therapies; specifically Losartan, a well known FDA-approved drug that not only lowers blood pressure and has been on the market for twenty years, but has also been found to lower transforming growth factor beta (TGFB) in mouse models. He ends part one with the question, "Does this work in people?"