Muscular dystrophy research at the UW has taken new directions with the appointment of Dr. Jeffrey Chamberlain to join the Division of Neurogenetics in the Department of Neurology. Chamberlain investigates new approaches to a group of genetic diseases characterized by degeneration and weakness of the muscles that control movement.

Dr. Jeffrey Chamberlain (shown to the right with one of his colleagues) is involved in studies of diseases that cause muscle degeneration and weakness.

A UW School of Medicine Ph.D. alumnus, Chamberlain is an international leader in the search for gene therapies for muscular dystrophy. Both Chamberlain and Dr. Stanley Froehner, chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, have strong research interests in the Duchenne’s form of muscular dystrophy.

Neurology department chair Bruce Ransom said, “Jeff Chamberlain is doing some of the most exciting research in the world on the problem of muscular dystrophy.”

Chamberlain has studied the location of the Duchenne muscular dystrophy gene and the genetic expression of dystrophin, a protein essential for normal muscle function. He is working on vectors that might deliver the missing genetic information into cells that are unable to produce dystrophin. Froehner has done research on the molecular mechanisms of muscle degeneration that appear in Duchenne muscular dystrophy.