John Porter from the National Institutes of Health likes to start talks by noting, “It’s a great time to be a mouse with a neuromuscular disease.” Exciting research results are regularly reported, where a treatment appears to cure one neuromuscular disease or another in a mouse — yet there are few treatments available today for people with any of these diseases, and only a few treatments in human clinical trials. Why does it take so long?

Researchers at five U.S. and one Canadian center are conducting a clinical trial of the medications coenzyme Q10 and lisinopril to determine their possible beneficial effects on heart function in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD) and five forms of limb-girdle muscular dystrophy (LGMD).

A Center for Research Translation of Systemic Exon Skipping in Muscular Dystrophy has been established by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

When Vance Taylor was a boy, he didn’t know any adult he could look to and say, “There’s somebody like me.”

His mother, Morena Noyes, recalls the first time she took Vance and his sister Kathy — both of whom have limb-girdle muscular dystrophy— to MDA summer camp.

“We were still in the parking lot, in our Astro van,” Noyes says. “Vance looked, and then he turned to his sister and said, ‘Kathy, there are people like you and me here!’ He was just beaming.”

The Muscular Dystrophy Association has awarded 40 research grants totaling $13.7 million to advance the understanding of disease processes and uncover new strategies for treatments and cures of muscular dystrophy and the more than 40 other diseases in the Association's program.

The new grants were recommended by MDA's Scientific and Medical Advisory Committees and approved by MDA's Board of Directors at its July 2011 meeting.

Community and empowerment were the themes of the third annual Becker Muscular Dystrophy (BMD) conference held at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on August 13, 2011.

Some 150 in-person attendees, and at least that many online attenders, engaged physicians, researchers, physical therapists and other BMD experts on a variety of topics, including the latest advances in research, medical management, physical therapy and clinical trials.