News About DMD » FED helps form the IDEW Group
FED helps form the IDEW Group
FED helps form the IDEW Group (International Duchenne Exon-skipping Working Group) to push forward clinical trials in exon-skipping methods.
The International Duchenne Exon-shipping Working Group (IDEW group) was formalized as an outcome of successful pre-clinical research, and proposed clinical trials resulting from FED, Department of Defense, and Japanese Government funding to a consortium of top laboratories. The Japanese government has provided a $800,000/yr competitive research grant to Shin'ichi Takeda MD for approaches using morpholino cocktails and systemic delivery. FED provided seed money to initiate a murine pre-clinical drug screening core in Washington DC, and funding to Carrie Miceli and Stan Nelson at UCLA to develop high throughput drug screening protocols to enhance potency of exon-skipping delivery. FED also supported initial morpholino production costs for systemic delivery and toxicity studies. The US Department of Defense has provided a $3.7 million program project to the above investigators, as well as Dr. Qi Lu for work on systemic dose/response and efficacy studies in mouse models. The IDEW group coordinates their research with conference calls and meetings, and through international workshops with other researchers working on exon-skipping.
