Hawken Miller, features writer —

Football and science seem to be disparate fields of play at first glance, but the nonprofit Uplifting Athletes is finding common ground by leveraging the popularity of college gridiron games to fund research for rare diseases. Its nearly two dozen chapters — representing college football teams across the nation…

As anyone affected by a rare disease knows, treating the illness while trying to go about everyday life is an expensive undertaking.  But exactly how expensive — in terms of direct and indirect costs across rare disease populations — might still come as a surprise: almost…

Many diseases have their own awareness color — breast cancer is pink, muscular dystrophy is green, and AIDS is red, for example — but what’s the significance of pink, green, blue, and purple lights side-by-side? These are the colors most often used to represent Rare Disease Day. This…

Diagnosed with sickle cell disease as a 6-month-old, Tristan Lee has faced a lot of challenges over his 37 years of life. But from a young age, he also learned how to turn those trials into triumphs. At age 9, a stroke due to his disease left him paralyzed…

Leaders in the U.S. rare disease community came together recently for a webinar to present helpful information on how to start a nonprofit and patient registry. They shared about how their respective organizations came to be, as well as the benefits of creating patient registries and how they can help…