Jaxson's Clay Shoot

A clay shoot in Joshua, Texas, held in Jaxson Flynt’s name to fund research into the disease he was born with.

Jaxson was diagnosed on October 30, 2014 with a single gene defect in MTRFR, also known as C12orf65. It is the gene behind CMT6, and it breaks the machinery mitochondria use to build their own proteins. His mother puts it better than any textbook: mitochondria are the batteries of your cells, and where most people’s run full, Jaxson’s run low.

It reaches almost everything in his day. He is nonverbal, he is fed through a g-button, and both his fine motor skills and his vision are limited. The vision is the part his family is racing. The same mutation causes optic nerve atrophy, and once the optic nerve begins to die there is no getting it back.

His family were told he would not reach five years old. He has been meeting milestones doctors thought impossible ever since.

What this shoot funds is specific: gene therapy aimed at saving the sight optic atrophy takes, and the animal model that has to exist before any such therapy can be tested for safety. Because MTRFR sits inside the wider family of mitochondrial disease, work that succeeds for Jaxson reaches a long way past one boy in Texas.

You do not need to be a shooter to come. Days like this are as much about the people standing around between stations as the clays themselves, and a family living with CMT in rural Texas may not get many other chances to be in a field with people who understand it.

Registration is handled on GiveSmart, HNF’s events platform.