Page 16 - Gates-AnnualReport-2019

HOPE FOR PATIENTS INSPIRES OUR WORK
Chris Attar slips in a kiss while Brady distracts himself from daily care with a Paw Patrol episode.
From the moment of Brady Attar’s arrival into this world, as a beautiful baby boy who somehow had startling skin lesions covering his body even before his cord was cut, his family had much to learn.
Eileen and Chris Attar had their second boy at one of the best children’s hospitals in Texas, and yet the expert who could teach them the most about extremely rare Epidermolysis Bullosa was hundreds of miles away in Austin. It would be days and weeks before they fully understood, still in shock, that “EB” was a genetic disorder that in severe versions weakens skin and soft membranes to the point where patients like Brady have new raw wounds every day.
And with no cure, EB doesn’t end.
In those first weeks, Eileen says now, “I couldn’t believe it, such denial. There’s just no way this could exist, that it could be this hard. How will I do this every day of my life from here on out?”
Three and a half years later, the Attars are themselves teaching some of the top clinicians and stem cell researchers in the world how families live with EB and where the first treatment breakthroughs might come. Having uprooted their family to Colorado in search of expertise, they spend a lot of time sharing their own knowledge with Gates Center researchers and Dr. Anna Bruckner, director of the Children’s Hospital Colorado EB Center of Excellence and her team. The Attars and other EB families from a multistate region visit the clinic regularly for treatment because it’s one of the few of its kind in the nation.
16 Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine