New Grants

Dr. George (Chip) Watts, assistant professor and associate division chief in musculoskeletal imaging and intervention, and colleagues at the UMass Chan Medical School Senator Paul D. Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Center https://www.umassmed.edu/wellstone/ were pleased to receive a $100k grant commitment from Solve FSHD  https://solvefshd.com/, to be used in kick-starting the Wellstone Project 1, part of a larger NIH grant proposal to initiate a three-year longitudinal clinical study at four sites to identify quantitative, non-invasive, and low-cost clinical biomarkers of muscle disease progression in the setting of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD).

Dr. Watts will be studying the effectiveness of musculoskeletal ultrasound and shear wave elastography (SWE) as a biomarker for disease progression in a pilot study of patients with FSHD. He will be working with local and national leaders in the field, including Drs. Lawrence Hayward and Mehdi Ghasemi from the neuromuscular division of the UMass department of Neurology.