Dr Daniel McCulloch

Muscular dystrophy patients have a serious disease for which there is no cure. Duchenne muscular dystrophy or ‘DMD’ is the most common form of muscular dystrophy and mainly affects boys. We’ve come a long way as researchers in understanding what is wrong with muscles in boys with DMD, and some current therapies work well to make muscles work better, but they only work short-term because the current therapies have bad side effects. Although boys with DMD are now living longer and have a better quality of life, we still need to find a therapy that will allow boys with DMD to live a normal life. Boys with DMD are wheelchair bound by their early teens and die in their late 20s or early 30s. At Deakin University, we are trying to find a better treatment for DMD. Like humans, other animals are naturally born with DMD and so we have a small fish called a zebrafish that carries the disease just like humans! Our DMD fish die at about 4-weeks of age, but before then we are able administer treatments to these fish to try to make its muscles work better so that it can liver longer. We only use treatments that are already safe and approved for use in humans, and because fish muscles are the same as human muscles, we believe that if we can cure this fish, we can also cure boys with DMD.

To make this Project work, we need $5,000 for aquarium equipment and $2,875 to look at the first potential treatment that might cure our DMD fish. If we make this target, which is a total of $7,875, we can then expand our Project by examining more treatments, but each treatment will cost an additional $1,500. Please help us find a better treatment for DMD!

Our research will tell us whether current treatments used for other diseases can give a better life to boys suffering with DMD.