My summer research

Just thought that I would take a minute to update y'all on what I have been doing this summer. I have been working in the Center for Gene Therapy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus. I received a scholarship from the medical school to help with living expenses. The research we are doing is really interesting. The short of it is that we are working on a treatment that would help rebuild muscle in patients who have muscle wasting diseases like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. There is a protein called follistatin which has been shown to increase muscle fiber size and function. Follistatin inhibits another protein called myostatin which limits muscle size. There are some interesting things that happen when you take out myostatin. The pictures below are of animals which have a defect in the myostatin gene. The dog is a whippet greyhound... yeah the fast really skinny tpe. This is called double muscling and recenlty this myostatin defect (if you could call it that) has recenlty been identified in a four year old boy. In our lab, We use a virus to deliver DNA to muscle cells. The DNA codes for follistatin which causes the muscle cells to produce extra follistatin and inhibit myostatin. We have gotten some pretty ripped mice and monkeys with this therapy and everything is looking really good so far. They want to start clinical trials on humans in about a year and I am helping my lab look at the immune response to gene delivery in monkeys.