106 - #SYNGAPCENSUS 2022 Update: +70 in Q1 2022

How many people in the world have SYNGAP1?

#SYNGAPCENSUS 2022 Update: +70 in Q1 2022

‍What’s SYNGAP CENSUS all about? 

Every quarter SynGAP Research Fund (SRF) and our partner organizations in the Syngap Global Network (SGN) tally up the newly diagnosed patients in our respective regions and come up with a global count. We predicted we would reach 1000 patients by the end of 2021. Today, the census stands at 1055 patients. 

Where does this number come from? 

This is the total number of actual, real life people with SYNGAP1 known to SYNGAP1 patient advocacy organizations and family support groups worldwide. It’s not the number of people in SYNGAP1 registries and it’s not the number of variants associated with the SYNGAP1 gene – multiple people can have the same variant. 

Why do we count the number of SYNGAP1 patients?

This number is incredibly important for SYNGAP1 advocacy because it’s crucial to recruiting more people into SYNGAP1 natural history studies such as SRF’s major collaboration with Ciitizen (recently acquired by Invitae). It’s also a benchmark of how highly SGN patient organizations are engaged with the patient population they represent.  

It is also crucial to give comfort to industry that we have enough patients to justify their investment:

“I think there are many in industry who are actually looking for a condition with say, a population of a thousand or more individuals. And that there is a reasonably clear playbook for approaching folks in industry and with coupling the right science with the right commercialization partners there’s a relatively clear playbook for advancing those relatively quickly in the matter of a few years.” - Dr. Timothy Yu, Simons Searchlight conference, August 2021.

How else can SYNGAP1 families help?

We urge everyone to reach out to SRF or any of our partners in SGN and make sure we have you counted. If your family member with SYNGAP1 is currently resident in any country where you can obtain medical records in English, we encourage you to participate in Ciitizen. If you’re in a Spanish speaking country, please also get in touch because we can organize the translation of your medical records into English. We also invite you to register and upload your genetic report if you have it in any language.

Finally, please put a pin on the SGN SynGAP Map to see which families might be close to you.

WHERE DID WE FIND MORE PATIENTS?

The summary census data is available in this Google Sheet. Thanks to our partnership and outreach with Ciitizen, we found an additional 32 families in the US. We thank all the SGN partner organizations for identifying an additional 38 families globally. 

THESE NUMBERS ARE STILL TOO LOW

We know there are many more undiagnosed patients out there. SRF and SGN are working diligently on outreach. One of the most powerful things we can do as parents and caregivers is to share our loved one’s diagnosis story. Please consider sharing your story via SRF’s Warrior Wednesday. It’s a great way to get your voice heard. If you’re part of an under-represented community or live in a country with a low diagnosis rate, please get in touch with us so we can help tell your story! 

Check out our tweet with the flags!