Isabel Aznarez

New Capabilities

Co-founder of Stoke Therapeutics and co-inventor of the TANGO platform

For nearly five decades, children born with Dravet syndrome—a severe genetic epilepsy that causes hundreds of seizures per month, cognitive decline, and a mortality rate between 15 and 20 percent—had no treatment that addressed the underlying cause. Every available drug, including two approved in the past eight years, could only partially suppress symptoms. On March 5, 2026, the New England Journal of Medicine published the first clinical evidence that a drug can modify the disease itself: zorevunersen, an antisense oligonucleotide that boosts protein production from the healthy copy of the gene responsible for the condition, reduced motor seizures by up to 91 percent in 81 children and sustained improvements in cognition and behavior over three years.

Updated Mar 5