About
On April 2, 2019, Terry and Georgia Pirovolakis received the heartbreaking news that their youngest son, Michael, had been diagnosed with a rare hereditary disease called SPG50. They were told to go home, love him, and give him the best life possible, as there was nothing available to prevent the paralysis he would eventually face. This marked the beginning of the Pirovolakis family's quest to find a better future for Michael, a journey that led to the creation of Elpida Therapeutics.
Elpida comes from the Greek word hope and was the driving force behind Terry Pirovolakis to make MELPIDA (Michael's Hope) the AAv9 Gene Therapy created with the love and support of hundred of scientist and tens of thousands of donors from around the world.
Terry realized how big the problem was and decided he would try and save as many children as humanly possible. Elpida is Social Responsible Corporation located out of California but is being run like a Non-Profit in an effort to be a self-sustaining, exponential Gene Therapy venture to help bring program from Proof Of Concept (POC) to BLA approval.
Our goal is to have all five programs in the clinic within the next 2-3 years, with each program dosing 8-12 children. We will seek BLA status for each program and we anticipate receiving two PRV vouchers for the initial 5x programs, which will enable us to develop an additional 16x programs in the future, while also prioritizing affordability for patients to access the treatments through a number of mechanisms.
Given the history of biotech companies retracting from rare disease programs and shelving other programs, we are confident in our ability to access a pipeline of future potential programs. We believe our Social Purpose Corporation model allows us to balance re-investment into more programs and equitable and fair access to therapeutics for disease indications with very small patient populations.
