His daughter, Tyche, was born with the chromosomal condition 17 years ago. The clinical trial that he recently completed, producing cautiously encouraging results about a drug called memantine, was part of a journey that began with her birth.
Costa found that little brain science had been done on people with the abnormality. There was a “huge focus,” he says, on preventing their births. His wife, Daisy, had declined the pre-natal testing that might have uncovered Tyche’s condition because testing had spurred a miscarriage of a previous pregnancy.
The birth of Costa’s daughter, named after the Greek goddess of fortune and chance, wound up reconfiguring his life and his career.
