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?

Edison drugs target FA, mitochondrial diseases

When a medical emergency strikes — and the patient is a person with a neuromuscular disease— it’s not just getting to the emergency room quickly that’s critical. It’s also critical to ensure the ER staff understands the patient’s special needs caused by muscle disease.

Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, remembers clearly a patient he saw more than a decade ago, when he first began specializing in metabolism and nutrition.

The patient was an 8-year-old boy who had rapidly become weak and eventually almost completely paralyzed after exercising. His muscles were breaking down, spilling a protein known as myoglobin into the blood and threatening the survival of the boy’s kidneys, if not of the child himself.