Putting our best foot forward: Clinical, treatment‐based and ethical considerations of nusinersen therapy in Canada for spinal muscular atrophy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is the most common genetic cause of infant mortality. SMA is a spectral disorder and is categorised based on symptom onset and severity. The median life expectancy for infants with SMA presenting before 6 months of age is less than 2 years without respiratory support. To date, there is no cure for SMA. In June 2017, nusinersen was approved in Canada as the first disease-modifying drug for SMA because of its demonstrated benefits on motor function and survival in clinical trials. However, with a price tag of almost 1 million dollars for the first year of therapy, careful clinical, treatment-based and ethical consideration of the principles of (i) best interests; (ii) universality; (iii) portability; (iv) public administration; (v) accessibility; and (vi) comprehensiveness are important guideposts to ensure transparent and equitable allocation of health-care resources for nusinersen and all other future orphan drugs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".