MRC Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases in Children and Adults

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A large number of people in the UK have diseases which affect their muscles and the nerves supplying muscles. Many of these disease are genetic and may develop at a young age causing severe disabilty and early death. A well known example is Duchenne muscular dystrophy but there are many other diseses affecting muscle an nerves that cause a lot of disability. There has been much research into these conditions and advances have been made in understanding the molecular and genetic causes. Unfortunatley this has not translated into new treatments that benefit patients. There are a number of reasons why these discoveries have not benefited patients yet. In this research programme we want to continue making important molecular discoveries but we also want to address this problem of translating molecular discoveries into treatment for patients. We will do this by developing better ways of assessing both animal models and patients using new techniques such as MRI. We will organise better systems for doing clnical trials, we will establish better systems to allow scientists to do research on patient samples with their consent and we will establish better ways of training more new researchers in this important area. We believe that this combined approach of having a single centre that encompasess molecular discovery right through to clinical trials in the patient will be a big advance for helping patients with these disabling diseases.