A
medical odyssey
When Hudson's
first son was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in 1997, she was shocked since
she did not know that she and her husband were carriers of the recessive
genetic trait that causes the disease. Three days later a friend loaned
them "Lorenzo's Oil," a movie about a couple with no medical training who
seek to find a cure for their terminally ill son. After watching the emotional
film, Hudson discussed with her husband, a landscape architect, the possibility
of quitting her job and going to medical school to learn more about their
son's condition. Ultimately, they decided that she would make cystic fibrosis
research her avocation instead.
"We just felt
strongly that there was something we could do," she says. After meeting
other cystic fibrosis patients and family members who pursued understanding
of the medical literature, "I began to think, 'Maybe this isn't tilting
at windmills.'"
After learning
basic biochemistry from textbooks, Hudson began her inquiry by devouring
almost 1,000 abstracts of the presentations made at the two medical conferences
on cystic fibrosis held annually in Europe and North America. She found
that researchers were pursuing gene therapy that could outright cure the
disease, but that solution was and still is years away.
"The big prize
is gene therapy, and if you're really going to make your mark in cystic
fibrosis that's where you'd make it," says Hudson, who anxiously awaits
a cure. "But until then, my boys and other people's children are still
sick and will get sicker each passing year."
Interested in
ways of preventing the symptoms brought on by the genetic abnormality,
Hudson learned from an associate on a cystic fibrosis e-mail list of an
online resource produced by the National Institutes of Health called PubMed
that abstracts hundreds of medical journals (www.pubmed.gov). She searched
those archives and identified the articles she needed, then found them
through BYU's library and pored over them at home. She has gathered thousands
of articles this way - the photocopies stand more than four feet high when
stacked on top of each other.
About a year
after her research began, a former student and friend of Hudson's died
of cystic fibrosis.
"At that time
I got really discouraged - I came to realize just how complex the body
is and how difficult it is to understand," she says. But then she got her
big break. Another mother of a cystic fibrosis patient sent Hudson an unheralded
study published in August of 1998 that pointed her toward glutathione,
a biochemical, as a primary factor in her son's disease. Months of further
research backed up the hypothesis.
Now that she
had an idea and an explanation for the chemistry behind it, Hudson sought
professional researchers to test her hypothesis by giving a solution of
glutathione to cystic fibrosis patients to see if it helped alleviate symptoms.
Pregnant with her fifth child, Hudson drilled her husband, David, in the
science of her findings and sent him in June of 1999 to the European conference
of cystic fibrosis researchers in the Hague, Netherlands. He was allowed
to present a poster on her hypothesis and while displaying it met Matthias
Griese, a cystic fibrosis researcher at the University of Munich's children's
hospital, who said he had also thought about the role of glutathione deficiency
in patients and would conduct a clinical trial. (He is now administering
inhaled glutathione to 18 cystic fibrosis patients). The night David returned
home with the promising news, Hudson was in labor. Their baby was diagnosed
with cystic fibrosis shortly thereafter.
In October 1999,
David attended the North American conference of cystic fibrosis researchers
in Seattle. He was not allowed to present his poster but attended a roundtable
discussion where he met Henry J. Forman, a cystic fibrosis researcher at
the University of Alabama-Birmingham who was also exploring the role of
glutathione. Forman was also the co-editor of the journal Free Radical
Biology and Medicine and told Hudson's husband that she could submit
her research for peer review.
After refining
her paper, Hudson submitted it in the spring of 2000. That summer, still
trying to find a researcher who would conduct a clinical trial, Hudson
consulted the chair of BYU's chemistry department. He referred her to his
former student Clark Bishop, now the medical director at the county's largest
hospital. Bishop agreed to introduce Hudson to the area's cystic fibrosis
researchers. He was so disappointed by their indifference to her hypothesis
that he told her he'd conduct the trial himself, provided she could raise
the $50,000 it would cost. In March of 2001 Hudson found out that her paper
had been accepted for publication. She continues to seek funding for the
clinical trial she believes will show that supplemental glutathione can
significantly alleviate some of the symptoms of cystic fibrosis.
"I didn't do
any primary research - I just looked at the output of many different scientific
communities and most of them had a piece of the puzzle," Hudson says. "I
give PubMed the credit - the diversity of journals that the NIH abstracts
is so immense, that I could cross these disciplinary boundaries with impunity."
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