The Hal Brodhurst Trust

The Hal Brodhurst Trust has an honourable corner of the Pompe story that deserves to be remembered.

Hal was the son of Robin and Desiree Brodhurst and suffered from infantile Pompe disease. When he was 6 months old, Hal had a radical treatment, a combined heart and bone marrow transplant, carried out in July 1993. The surgeon was the heart transplant pioneer, Sir Magdi Yacoub. Sadly, the treatment was not effective and Hal died four months later.

His parents established the Hal Brodhurst Trust in July 1994, in order to help fund research into Pompe disease. The aims of the Trust were:

1. To advance education by the promotion of research into the causes and treatment of glycogen storage disorders with particular concern for type 2 Pompe's Disease on terms that the results of such research are published. 2. to relieve the sickness of people suffering from glycogen storage disorders with particular concern for type 2 Pompe's Disease and in particular and without limitation to promote the establishment of a unit dedicated to the treatment of glycogen storage disorder patients at a United Kingdom hospital.

They raised funds which were put at the disposal of Magdi Yacoub, who established a small team at Harefield Hospital, near London. A Pompe Disease workshop was held there on 31 March 1995 and I attended on behalf of the AGSD-UK. The focus very much reflected Sir Magdi's own interests, with several talks on transplantation. Arnold Reuser also made a presentation. Robin and Desiree conducted themselves with their usual quiet dignity.

Something that particularly sticks in my mind is that Sir Magdi said that his research strategy would be to sequence the Pompe mutations, find out what had gone wrong and then find a way of making the mutated enzymes work again. I was astonished by this because it was vanishingly unlikely to work (I still do think that, regardless of the fact that an analogous approach is being pursued by Amicus Therapeutics) . Being a great man in one field is no guarantee of being right in another one. But I digress.

The team at Harefield, led by Ann Child of the Institute of Child Health in London, looked at Pompe tissue samples from across the UK and carried out DNA sequencing. The work was published in the journal Human Mutation in 1998. The paper, by Clare Beesley, described some novel mutations causing Pompe disease (including the one I carry, if I remember rightly). After that, the Trust faded from view and, as far as I know, no longer exists.

Partly, this was a reflection of the limitations of charities dedicated to one child. With the best will in the world, by their very nature they find it difficult to draw the wider support needed for the longer haul. This reinforced my view that the AGSD-UK route was the right one for whatever contribution I was able to make. It also brought home to me the importance of a Scientific Advisory Board to give broad-based specialist advice.

However, and most importantly, the Hal Brodhurst Trust had the considerable achievement of funding the first UK research into Pompe disease. An important milestone and a lasting memorial for Hal.