UNC-Chapel Hill starts muscular dystrophy research center

From the Triangle Business Journal in North Carolina:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has won an award to start a muscular dystrophy center named after one of its most famous alumni: the late Sen. Paul Wellstone.

The five-year, $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will establish the Senator Paul D. Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Center at the university. The research center joins six other Wellstone Centers around the country focused on muscular dystrophy, a blanket term for degenerative muscular diseases.

UNC’s center will be specifically focused on gene therapy for the treatment of the disease. The center will pursue three projects – one a clinical trial to analyze the safety of gene therapy for muscular dystrophy patients, one analyzing the best way of delivering gene therapy to large muscle groups, and one meant to improve the best “delivery vehicle” for treating muscle disorders with gene-based therapies.

Jude Samulski, director of UNC’s Gene Therapy Center, will be director of the Wellstone Center at UNC.

A long-serving Minnesota senator, Wellstone graduated from UNC in 1965. In 1969, he earned his Ph.D. in political science from the university before taking a job at Carleton College in Minnesota.

Wellstone was elected to the Senate in 1990 and served there until he died in a plane crash in 2002.