Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/07/2009
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Despite the poor prognosis of muscular dystrophy, therapeutic interventions have been lacking and outcome measures for clinical trials have been limited to measures of muscle function and quality of life, serum biomarkers of muscle breakdown, and invasive muscle biopsies. The development of additional quantitative outcome measures that are noninvasive and sensitive to changes in muscle structure and composition are vital to facilitate the rapid translation of promising new interventions from preclinical studies to clinical trials. Therefore, our objective has been to develop and validate noninvasive imaging strategies that can be used to monitor disease progression in muscular dystrophies and serve as surrogate outcome measures in future clinical trials.  In this presentation I will introduce the use of magnetic resonance (MR) methods to follow structural changes in dystrophic muscle.  In addition, I will illustrate the use of MR methodology to noninvasively follow therapeutic interventions in dystrophic muscle following gene, drug, and stem cell delivery.