Sept. 19, 2008

Boston Institute Becomes MD Center

Boston Biomedical Research Institute (BBRI) in Watertown, Mass., recently was awarded $9 million by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to become a Senator Paul D. Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Center.

Louis Kunkel, professor of genetics and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and chairman of MDA's Scientific Advisory Committee, will co-direct the new center with Charles Emerson Jr., senior scientist and director at BBRI.

Kunkel, a long-time MDA adviser who has received several MDA research grants, was on the MDA-funded scientific team at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital in Boston that first identified the gene that, when flawed, causes Duchenne muscular dystrophy in 1986.

The Wellstone centers were established in 2001, following passage of the MD-CARE Act (Community Assistance, Research and Education), which was strongly supported by MDA. The Association co-funded the first three centers with NIH. They're named after the late Minnesota senator, a champion of muscular dystrophy issues in Congress.  

The BBRI center will focus on facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), the second most prevalent adult muscular dystrophy. Daniel Paul Perez, who has FSHD and lives in Bedford, Mass., was instrumental in securing BBRI's NIH funding.

At BBRI, MDA currently supports Xingbin Ai, who is studying muscle regeneration; and recently supported Jeffrey Boone Miller for studies of drugs and genetic interventions to combat muscular dystrophy-related cell death.

Corporate collaborators with the new center include Acceleron Pharma, a biotech company in Cambridge, Mass., which is developing drugs to increase muscle mass and strength; and Cambridge, Mass.-based Genzyme Corp., a biopharmaceutical company developing cell-based therapeutic approaches to muscle disease.