Extraordinary Measures | |
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Directed by | Tom Vaughan |
Written by | Robert Nelson Jacobs |
Based on | The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million — And Bucked the Medical Establishment — in a Quest to Save His Children by Geeta Anand |
Produced by |
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Starring | |
Cinematography | Andrew Dunn |
Edited by | Anne V. Coates |
Music by | Andrea Guerra |
Production company | Double Feature Films |
Distributed by | CBS Films (North America) Sony Pictures Releasing International (International) [1] [2] |
Release date |
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Running time | 106 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $31 million [3] |
Box office | $15 million [3] |
Extraordinary Measures is a 2010 American medical drama film starring Brendan Fraser, Harrison Ford, and Keri Russell. It was the first film produced by CBS Films, the film division of CBS Corporation, who released the film on January 22, 2010. The film is about parents who form a biotechnology company to develop a drug to save the lives of their children, who have a life-threatening disease. The film is based on the true story of John and Aileen Crowley, whose children have Pompe disease. The film was shot in St. Paul, Oregon; Portland, Oregon; Tualatin, Oregon; Wilsonville, Oregon; Manzanita, Oregon; Beaverton, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington.
John Crowley and his wife Aileen are a Portland couple with two of their three children suffering from Pompe disease, a genetic anomaly that typically kills most children before their tenth birthdays. John, an advertising executive, contacts Robert Stonehill, a researcher in Nebraska who has done innovative research for an enzyme treatment for the rare disease. John and Aileen raise money to help Stonehill's research and the required clinical trials.
John takes on the task full-time to save his children's lives, launching a biotechnology research company working with venture capitalists and then rival teams of researchers. This task proves very daunting for Stonehill, who already works around the clock. As time is running short, Stonehill's angry outburst hinders the company's faith in him, and the profit motive may upend John's hopes. The researchers race against time to save the children who have the disease.
John Crowley makes a cameo appearance as a venture capitalist.
Adapted by Robert Nelson Jacobs from the nonfiction book The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million—and Bucked the Medical Establishment—in a Quest to Save His Children by the Pulitzer Prize journalist Geeta Anand, the film is also an examination of how medical research is conducted and financed.
Filming took place at several spots in and around Portland, Oregon, mostly at the OHSU Doernbecher Children's Hospital, Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Nike campus in Beaverton, Oregon. This was the first time Nike allowed filming on their campus and they donated the location payment to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. [4] During filming, the working title was The Untitled Crowley Project. [5]
In the film, the children are 9 and 7 years old. Their non-fiction counterparts were diagnosed at 15 months and 7 days old and received treatment at 5 and 4, respectively. [6]
Myozyme, a drug developed for treating Pompe disease, was simultaneously approved for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. Henceforth, more than 1000 infants born worldwide every year with Pompe disease will no longer face the prospect of death before reaching their first birthday for lack of a treatment for the condition.
The screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs is based on Geeta Anand's book The Cure ( ISBN 9780060734398). [7] Parts of the book first appeared as a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal .
The small start-up company Priozyme was based on Oklahoma City-based Novazyme. The larger company, called Zymagen in the film, was based on Genzyme in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [8] Novazyme was developing a protein therapeutic, with several biological patents pending, to treat Pompe Disease, when it was bought by Genzyme. The patent portfolio was cited in the press releases announcing the deal. [9]
Genzyme claims that Dr. Robert Stonehill's character is based upon scientist and researcher William Canfield, [10] who founded Novazyme. [11] According to Roger Ebert's review, the character is based on Yuan-Tsong Chen, [6] a scientist and researcher from Duke University [12] who collaborated with Genzyme in producing Myozyme, the drug which received FDA approval.
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 29% based on reviews from 142 critics and an average rating of 4.88 out of 10. The site's general consensus is, "Despite a timely topic and a pair of heavyweight leads, Extraordinary Measures never feels like much more than a made-for-TV tearjerker." [13] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 0–100 reviews from film critics, has a rating score of 45 based on 33 reviews. [14] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale. [15]
Richard Corliss of Time magazine wrote: "Fraser keeps the story anchored in reality. Meredith Droeger does too: as the Crowleys' afflicted daughter, she's a smart little bundle of fighting spirit. So is the movie, which keeps its head while digging into your heart. You have this critic's permission to cry in public." [16] The New York Times' A. O. Scott said in his review: "The startling thing about Extraordinary Measures is not that it moves you. It's that you feel, at the end, that you have learned something about the way the world works." [17]
Ramona Bates MD, writing for the health news organisation, EmaxHealth, stated that the film brings attention to Pompe disease. [18] Peter Rainer from The Christian Science Monitor mentions that Big Pharma got a surprisingly free pass in the film and that it will come as a surprise to all those sufferers struggling to get orphan drugs developed. [19]
Jef Akst, writing for the journal The Scientist, stated that the film is good depiction of the "hard to swallow fiscal issues of drug development." [20]
The film opened at #8 on its opening weekend, taking in $6 million. The film remained in theaters for four weeks, earning $12 million.
Keri Lynn Russell is an American actress. She played the title role in the drama series Felicity (1998–2002), which won her a Golden Globe Award, and later portrayed Elizabeth Jennings in the spy thriller series The Americans (2013–2018), which earned her nominations for several Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe Awards. For playing the lead role in the political drama series The Diplomat (2023), she received further Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.
Sanofi S.A. is a French multinational pharmaceutical and healthcare company headquartered in Paris, France. The corporation was established in 1973 and merged with Synthélabo in 1999 to form Sanofi-Synthélabo. In 2004, Sanofi-Synthélabo merged with Aventis and renamed to Sanofi-Aventis, which were each the product of several previous mergers. It changed its name back to Sanofi in May 2011. The company is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.
Glycogen storage disease type II, also called Pompe disease, and formerly known as GSD-IIa. It is an autosomal recessive metabolic disorder which damages muscle and nerve cells throughout the body. It is caused by an accumulation of glycogen in the lysosome due to deficiency of the lysosomal acid alpha-glucosidase enzyme. GSD-II and Danon disease are the only glycogen storage diseases with a defect in lysosomal metabolism, and Pompe disease was the first glycogen storage disease to be identified, in 1932 by the Dutch pathologist J. C. Pompe.
Joel David Moore is an American character actor and director. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Moore studied acting in college before relocating to Los Angeles to pursue a film career. His first major role was as Owen Dittman in the 2004 comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, followed by roles in the comedy Grandma's Boy (2006), Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential (2006), and the independent slasher film Hatchet (2006).
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is a public research university focusing primarily on health sciences with a main campus, including two hospitals, in Portland, Oregon. The institution was founded in 1887 as the University of Oregon Medical Department and later became the University of Oregon Medical School. In 1974, the campus became an independent, self-governed institution called the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center, combining state dentistry, medicine, nursing, and public health programs into a single center. It was renamed Oregon Health Sciences University in 1981 and took its current name in 2001, as part of a merger with the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), in Hillsboro. The university has several partnership programs including a joint PharmD Pharmacy program with Oregon State University in Corvallis.
The Shriners Children's Portland is a 29-bed, non-profit pediatric hospital located in Portland, in the U.S. state of Oregon. It specializes in orthopedics, cleft lip, and palate disorders as part of the 22-hospital system belonging to the Shriners Hospitals for Children. Established in 1924, the current campus opened in 1983. The hospital is located on the Oregon Health and Science University campus, and is active in the research and development of new technology.
Man's Best Friend is a 1993 American science fiction horror film, directed and written by John Lafia. It stars Ally Sheedy, Lance Henriksen, Robert Costanzo, Frederic Lehne, John Cassini, and J. D. Daniels.
The Death of the Incredible Hulk is a 1990 American television superhero film, the last of three films based on the 1978–1982 television series The Incredible Hulk. Bill Bixby reprises his role as Dr. David Banner and Lou Ferrigno returns to play the Hulk. It was filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Prior to Bill Bixby's death in 1993, there was talks of The Revenge of the Incredible Hulk television film which would resurrect the character.
Alglucosidase alfa, sold under the brand name Myozyme among others, is an enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) orphan drug for treatment of Pompe disease, a rare lysosomal storage disorder (LSD). Chemically, the drug is an analog of the enzyme that is deficient in patients affected by Pompe disease, alpha-glucosidase. It is the first drug available to treat this disease.
The Oregon Health Plan is Oregon's state Medicaid program. It is overseen by the Oregon Health Authority.
John Francis Crowley is an American biotechnology executive and entrepreneur and the chairman and CEO of Amicus Therapeutics. He co-founded Novazyme Pharmaceuticals with William Canfield, which was later acquired by Genzyme Corporation, and founded Orexigen Therapeutics. In 2006, he was profiled in the book The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million – And Bucked the Medical Establishment – In a Quest to Save His Children by Geeta Anand. In 2010, Crowley released his memoir, Chasing Miracles: The Crowley Family Journey of Strength, Hope, and Joy. Crowley and his family were the inspiration for the movie Extraordinary Measures starring Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser in 2010. Crowley was named CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the largest Biotechnology advocacy organization in the world, in 2023.
Cannabis in Oregon is legal for both medical and recreational use. In recent decades, the U.S. state of Oregon has had a number of legislative, legal, and cultural events surrounding use of cannabis. Oregon was the first state to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of cannabis, and among the first to authorize its use for medical purposes. An attempt to recriminalize possession of small amounts of cannabis was turned down by Oregon voters in 1997.
William Canfield is a glycobiologist, chief scientific officer and founder of an Oklahoma City-based biotechnology company, Novazyme, which was acquired by Genzyme in August 2001 and developed, among other things, an enzyme that can stabilize Pompe disease, based on Canfield's ongoing research since 1998. Canfield subsequently left Genzyme and established, with his partner in the Novazyme operation, John Crowley, another research laboratory, which he still heads. He saved Cytovance from bankruptcy by forming an investor group and raising $9 million after Crowley suddenly left the lab in 2005 to become the chief executive officer at Amicus Therapeutics in New Jersey
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Oregon is a part of the Western United States, with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idaho. The 42° north parallel delineates the southern boundary with California and Nevada. The western boundary is formed by the Pacific Ocean.
Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD) was from 1983 to 2017 an American nonprofit membership organization that worked to stop child abuse and neglect based on religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and quackery. CHILD opposed religious exemptions from child health and safety laws. These exemptions have been used as a defense in criminal cases when parents have withheld lifesaving medical care on religious grounds. These exemptions also have discouraged reporting and investigation of religion-based medical neglect of children and spawned many outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases and deaths. CHILD publicized the ideological abuse and neglect of children, lobbied for equal protection laws for children, and filed lawsuits and amicus curiae briefs in related cases.
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Markus Grompe is a professor of Pediatrics and practicing physician at Oregon Health & Science University. since 1991. Since 2004, he has been director of the Oregon Stem Cell Center at OHSU. Until 2018, he was also director of the Papé Family Pediatric Research Institute, Vice Chair for research in the OHSU department of Pediatrics, and holder of the Ray Hickey Endowed Chair at Doernbecher Children's Hospital.
Yuan-Tsong Chen is a Taiwanese geneticist and physician, notable for his work on human genetic disorders. He is the director emeritus (2001–2010) and distinguished research fellow (2001–present) of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and also tenured professor of pediatrics of Duke University (1993–present) Chen was a 2019 awardee of Taiwan's Presidential Science Award, as were Yuan-Pern Lee and Wei Fu-chan.