MDA Grantee Receives Gene Therapy Award

MDA research grantee Dongsheng Duan, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has received a prestigious Outstanding New Investigator Award from the American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT).

The ASGT, founded in 1996, is a professional, nonprofit medical and scientific organization dedicated to the development of gene therapy and related molecular strategies to treat disease.

Duan’s current MDA grant is for the development of gene therapy of heart disease in a mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). An earlier MDA grant to Duan was for development of better ways to deliver genes using molecular transport vehicles made from the adeno-associated virus (AAV).

Duan, who came to the United States as a graduate student in 1993, completed his doctorate in pathology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and postdoctoral training in anatomy and cell biology at the University of Iowa in 1998.

His lab specializes in the development of gene therapy for DMD-associated heart disease and strategies to deliver a larger version of the dystrophin gene, needed to treat DMD, than is now possible.

The ASGT award, which is for $1,000, stipulates that the investigator be seven or fewer years out from his first full-time faculty position; and be independently conducting original research in basic science, technology or clinical application of gene therapy.

Duan is also receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health.