Extraordinary Measures (2010) on Netflix
Two of John Crowley's children have Pompe disease, which usually kills before age ten. The advertising executive seeks out Robert Stonehill, a Nebraska researcher working on an enzyme treatment.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb6.4/1018,728 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes28%
Trailer
Plot summary
John Crowley and his wife Aileen live in Portland with three children. Two of them, Megan and Patrick, have Pompe disease, a genetic disorder in which the body cannot break down sugar. Most children with it do not reach their tenth birthday. John, an advertising executive, learns of Robert Stonehill, a Nebraska researcher whose enzyme work could point toward a treatment. Stonehill has little money for his laboratory, and a manner that has driven off colleagues and funders. John and Aileen raise funds for his research and the clinical trials it needs, and John leaves his job to build a biotechnology company, courting venture capitalists and competing research teams.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Extraordinary Measures (2010)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Filming at the Nike campus in Beaverton, Oregon marked the first time the company had ever allowed a movie to film on its grounds, and Nike donated the location payment to Doernbecher Children's Hospital.
- The film compresses the real timeline: on screen the children are 9 and 7 years old, but their non-fiction counterparts were diagnosed at 15 months and 7 days old and received treatment at 5 and 4.
SPOILER
Myozyme, the drug developed for treating Pompe disease, was approved for sale simultaneously by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency; henceforth more than 1,000 infants born worldwide every year with the disease would no longer face the prospect of death before reaching their first birthday for lack of a treatment.- There is disagreement over who Harrison Ford's character is based on: Genzyme says Dr. Robert Stonehill is modeled on Novazyme founder William Canfield, while Roger Ebert's review says he is based on Duke University researcher Yuan-Tsong Chen, who helped Genzyme develop the drug Myozyme.
