Act Now to Help Patients: Support HB 1735, Right to Try

Urgent: NH Senate Committee Voted to Block Desperate Patients from Seeking Treatments. Act Now to Protect Those in Need.

There are people in New Hampshire — people living with blindness, deafness, devastating injuries, and rare diseases — who could access life-changing therapies today, if the law allowed it. New Hampshire’s Right to Try law gives terminally ill patients the right to pursue experimental treatments the FDA hasn’t approved. HB 1735 extends that same right to patients with chronic and debilitating conditions — people who aren’t dying tomorrow, but who are suffering every day.

HB 1735 passed the full House 181–151. Then, on May 6, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee voted 3–2 to send it to Interim Study — effectively killing it — and placed it on the consent calendar, where it will die without debate unless someone speaks up.

The full Senate will vote on whether to accept the committee’s recommendation. This is the last chance to save it. Call your senator today and ask them to:

• Pull HB 1735 from the consent calendar
• Vote against the committee’s Interim Study recommendation
• Pass HB 1735 and give suffering patients the right to try

A brief, courteous request is most effective: “Please pull HB 1735 from consent and vote Ought to Pass to expand Right to Try protections for patients with chronic and debilitating illnesses.”

The People the Senate Committee Just Turned Away

We believe miracles are possible — and not just life-saving ones. There are forms of deafness and blindness that can now be cured with gene therapies. People born and raised deaf are now dancing to music for the first time. Others, blind for decades, are now able to watch their children play soccer. Individualized bone and cartilage grafts — crafted from a patient’s own stem cells — can repair debilitating deformities and injuries that have no other treatment. A company in the Manchester Millyard already manufactures these treatments — but can only sell them in Florida, because New Hampshire law hasn’t caught up.

These are not dying patients in the conventional sense. They are people who will live for years — but who will suffer through every one of those years unless something changes. The FDA has no viable pathway to commercialize these individualized therapies. The FDA itself has admitted its “current regulations are onerous and unnecessarily demanding, provide unclear patient protection, and stifle innovation.” Meanwhile, the people trapped outside that wall of red tape have no alternative. They are told, in effect, that it is not lawful to heal them.

The wealthy can always find another way. When billionaire GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij was diagnosed with bone cancer and ran out of FDA-approved options, he flew to Germany for a radioligand therapy targeting his tumor’s specific molecular signature. He came home cancer-free and has dedicated his life to making that same possibility available to people who can’t afford a flight to Europe.

China approved the world’s first commercial gene therapy in 2003. The FDA didn’t fully approve a comparable treatment until 2022 — nineteen years later. As patient advocate Jake Selliger put it: when the FDA blocks a promising drug, people die — but their bodies go into an invisible graveyard. Families bury someone they love, and regulators face no penalty for letting it happen.

HB 1735 builds on the Right to Try law Cornerstone helped champion last year — extending its protections from the terminally ill to anyone suffering from a chronic or debilitating condition, giving them the legal right to pursue experimental treatments in consultation with their physician. Patients remain safeguarded by state health regulations, malpractice liability, and professional licensing. This is not the Wild West. It is compassion backed by law. Three senators voted against it — but the full Senate can still make it right.

📖 Read More: Life-Saving Therapies Shouldn’t Just Be for Billionaires

In NH Journal, Cornerstone’s Associate Director Ian Huyett makes the case for why life-saving therapies shouldn’t just be for billionaires — and why New Hampshire, 40 minutes from the world’s largest biotech hub, is uniquely positioned to lead the personalized therapy revolution.

📰 Read More: Erica Layon in the Union Leader

Erica Layon writes in the Union Leader on why New Hampshire must act now — before our best biotech innovators, and the patients who need them, look elsewhere.

✝️ Why Christians Support Right to Try

Christians believe that God became man and introduced Himself to the nations first through a ministry of healing miracles: making the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk; cleansing the lepers, raising a paralytic, healing a cripple, and restoring a man’s withered and deformed hand to the fullness of life — even when the Pharisees told him it was illegal to do so.

Christ did not teach us, as a few people imagine today, that healing is to be done unilaterally by God alone, or that we are here to passively accept the sickness and suffering in the world and pray. Instead, Christ, when He was about to heal a man born blind, told His disciples, “This man was born blind that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We must work the works of Him who sent me.” In the same way, Christ told us, “What you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me.” For this reason, Christians invented the first hospitals and drove the advancement of medicine and the sciences throughout history.

Today, we stand on the precipice of a revolution in regenerative biotechnology. But that revolution is obstructed by a wall of legal and regulatory obstacles that make promising but experimental treatments inaccessible to most people.