CMD - Mahasweta Girgenrath, Ph.D.

MDA awarded a research grant totaling $357,465 over a period of three years to Mahasweta Girgenrath, an assistant professor in the Health Sciences Department at Boston University in Boston. The funds will help support Girgenrath’s work to find a combination therapy to treat type 1A congenital muscular dystrophy (MDC1A).

Cell Therapy - Ilona Skerjanc, Ph.D.

MDA awarded a research grant totaling $280,487 over a period of two years to Ilona Skerjanc, a professor in the department of biochemistry, microbiology & immunology at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada.

CMD/LGMD - Jeffrey Miller, Ph.D.

MDA awarded a research grant totaling $343,860 over a period of three years to Jeffrey Boone Miller, senior scientist at Boston Biomedical Research Institute in Watertown, Mass., and associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Muscle Physiology - Elizabeth Chen, Ph.D.

MDA has awarded a research grant totaling $321,489 over a period of three years to Elizabeth Chen, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. The funds will help support Chen's research into a mechanistic understanding of normal muscle physiology, which will inform potential therapeutic strategies aimed at treating various genetic and acquired degenerative muscle diseases.

Why Does It Take So Long To Go from Mouse to Man?

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?

Caregivers: Teaching Independence

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.”

Research Updates Fall 2011

Featured in this update:

Families, experts meet at BMD Conference

Three trials study blood-vessel-dilating drugs in BMD, DMD

Results of daily, weekly prednisone treatment about the same in DMD

Man with CMD Died Doing What He Loved

Michael Wogan had been looking forward to the trip to the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nev.

According to his younger brother James, “Michael liked to get out and travel, and he was so excited about getting on a plane.”

Michael’s older brother Billy, 26 — who, like Michael, 22, and James, 19, has congenital muscular dystrophy (CMD)— was supposed to attend the show with their dad. When he couldn’t, Michael went instead.

He promised to tell his brothers all about it.

Induced Stem Cells Require Cautious Approach

Stem cells have been much in the news lately, including for neuromuscular diseases.

MDA Awards $13.7 Million in Research Grants

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.

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