Rare diseases at a glance

Rare diseases are life-threatening or chronically debilitating conditions affecting less than 5 in 10,000 people in the EU. Most of these people suffer from diseases affecting less than 1 in 100,000 people.

Between 5,000 and 8,000 distinct rare diseases exist, affecting between 6% and 8% of the population in total – in other words, between 27 million and 36 million people in the EU.

On average, five new diseases are described every week in the medical literature.

Chronic Myeloid Leukemia and Bladder Pain Syndrome are among those orphan diseases that we at MEROVEN consider a challenging responsibility of delivering the best cure for such diseases.

Other Orphan diseases including spinal muscular atrophy, lysosomal storage disorders, patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) and cystic fibrosis’s symptoms of such rare diseases may appear at birth or in childhood. More than half of rare diseases appear during adulthood, such as renal-cell carcinoma, glioma and acute myeloid leukaemia.

As much as 80% of rare diseases are identified as being of genetic origin and affect between 3% and 4% of births. Other rare diseases are due to degenerative and proliferative causes.