Grant to help look for a cure for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy – The Charlottesville Newsplex

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (NEWSPLEX) -- Researchers are getting millions of dollars to try and find a cure for a type of Muscular Dystrophy that usually kills young men by the time they reach their mid-20s.

According to a release, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy affects one in 3,500 boys, taking their ability to walk by the age of 12 and typically killing them in their mid-20s.

While doctors do know what causes the disease, potential treatments for it have consistently failed.

Now University of Virginia researchers will be looking to change that will the help of a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Members of the UVA School of Medicine and the School of Engineering and Applied Science will use the money to build a computer model of the disease to look at what may have undermined efforts to develop an effective treatment.

Duchenne is caused by the lack of a particular cellular protein, called dystrophin, and researchers think the problems with treatments could be caused by differences in biomechanics and inflammation between lab mice and children.

With the model, researchers will look to better understand how muscle damage and inflammation drive the disease, understand the relationship between movement and inflammation, explain why previous potential treatments worked in mice but failed in people, create better mouse models to replicate the disease, and identify new drugs and treatments that will work in people.

This will be a multi-year project studying the effects of the disease at the microscopic level all the way to using magnetic-resonance imaging to see the changes in muscle tissue over time.

The researchers will be using an open-source software for their model so it can be available to scientists everywhere to speed the development of new treatments.

The team of researchers includes members of the UVA Department of Biomedical Engineering, the UVA Children's Hospital, the Virginia Tech Department of Human Nutrition, food and Exercise, VT's Muscle Group, and the University of Iowa's Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics.

Read more here:
Grant to help look for a cure for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy - The Charlottesville Newsplex