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Overview

The Senator Paul D. Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Center (MDCRC)--named for the late Senator Paul Wellstone, will be critical towards our investigative and discovery progress.This MDCRC is organized around the concept that limiting fibrosis in the muscular dystrophies will help extend the period of successful regeneration via the patients own satellite cell repair, increase the benefits associated with therapies that increase the patients’ muscle repair capacity, and will extend the age at which patients can benefit from eventual viral gene or stem cell therapies. Thus the primary objectives of this MDCRC are to facilitate the attainment of clinically useful pharmacological means of inhibiting fibrosis and to identify the best existing pharmacological inhibitors of fibrosis, as well as drive the development of new classes of inhibitors. Our further goal is to develop non-invasive imaging techniques to assess the progression of fibro-fatty replacement of skeletal and cardiac muscles.