GENEration Hope

In this GENEration Hope interview, Ron Kleiman speaks with Dr. Allyson Berent — rare disease mom, veterinarian, interventional specialist, researcher, biotech founder, and Chief Science Officer of FAST, the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics. After her daughter Quincy was diagnosed with Angelman syndrome, Allyson became one of the leading voices in parent-led drug development. Through F...

Dr. Yoshitsugu Aoki is a physician-scientist at the forefront of RNA therapeutics and genetic medicine. As Director of the Department of Molecular Therapy at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry in Tokyo, Dr. Aoki has helped lead the development of antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy—including viltolarsen, an exon-skipping therapy approved in both J...

Welcome — I’m Ron Kleiman, and this is GENEration Hope. In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Guoping Feng, Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, affiliated with the McGovern Institute, the Yang Tan Collective, and the Broad Institute. We talk about: • Why he left medicine to pursue research that could lead to treatments for kids  • The urgency of moving faster — because “kids are growing up every day”...

Sue Lomas helped build the Phelan-McDermid Syndrome community in the earliest days—when families were scattered, information was scarce, and finding “your people” took persistence. In this conversation, Sue and I talk about how rare-disease communities form, why early diagnosis and genetics matter, and how parent-led foundations can accelerate research by connecting families, clinicians, and scien...

Welcome to GENEration Hope — I’m Ron Kleiman. Today’s guest is Dr. Katy Phelan, a pioneering human geneticist and one of the founders of the Phelan-McDermid Syndrome Foundation (PMSF). This conversation was recorded at the PMSF Annual Conference (2024).Dr. Phelan takes us back to the earliest days of how Phelan-McDermid syndrome was first identified, how families found each other long before socia...

Monica Coenraads, founder and CEO of the Rett Syndrome Research Trust (RSRT), has led the charge to cure Rett Syndrome—raising over $123 million and driving multiple gene therapy programs now in clinical trials. In this in-depth conversation, Monica shares her personal journey from her daughter Chelsea’s diagnosis to building one of the world’s most impactful rare disease research organizations. S...

Welcome to Generation Hope. In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Alex Kolevzon (Mount Sinai) sits down with Ron to discuss the science, the trials, and the human side of gene therapy for rare neurodevelopmental disorders. In this episode we cover:• Dr. Kolevzon’s path into autism research and why focusing on genetics (like SHANK3) matters.• The evolution from symptom-based treatments to gene-target...

Dr. Curtis Rogers is a Senior Clinical Geneticist at the Greenwood Genetic Center and a long-time leader in the Phelan-McDermid syndrome (PMS) community. In this wide-ranging conversation recorded at the 2024 Phelan-McDermid community conference, we talk about: • What inspired Dr. Rogers to pursue medicine and genetics • How Phelan-McDermid syndrome was first recognized • How families built a comm...

Newborn genome sequencing isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s already changing which babies get diagnosed, when they get treated, and how many families spend years in diagnostic limbo. When our daughter Evie started missing her milestones, we spent five years bouncing between specialists, MRIs, EEGs, blood tests, microarrays and more—with no answers. It took whole exome sequencing to finally revea...