Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

Curiosity.com. I'm Cody goth. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about how

doctors came up with a drug to treat one specific patient with a rare genetic disease and how you really

can tell if someone's sick just by looking at them.

Blood satisfy some curiosity.

Doctors recently developed a customized drug to save a little girl's life,

and the story of how it happened could offer a potential template for the rapid development of patient

customized treatments.

Joining us today to share this story is Lauren Black,

Distinguished Scientist and the Scientific Advisory Services at Charles River Labs.

And the story starts in December 2016,

when a couple in Colorado learned that their six-year-old daughter

Mila had a rare neurodegenerative disorder called Batten Disease.

It's important to understand what this disease is and what it entails.

So here's Lauren Black with the background.

The gist of it is that she has Batten's Disease 7.

There's at least 14 or 15 different versions of this and there's all these different

proteins that are all involved in clearing out the lysosomal storage if you will

the garbage that needs to be taken out of the cells.

And this is most critically important in our nerve cells.

So what happens is that the garbage piles up and interferes with normal cell processes and then the cells end up dying.

They get so badly affected.

...