Curation of Muscular Dystrophy Genes

About This Grant

Muscular dystrophies and myopathies encompass a large group of genetic diseases characterized by overlapping and indistinguishable clinical features but are caused by sequence variants in more than 200 genes. Accurate diagnosis and prevalence estimates for these disorders are essential for timely therapeutic development and high-quality patient care, yet up to 50% of patients do not receive a definitive molecular diagnosis despite increasing access to next-generation sequencing tests. This proposal aims to bridge the gap between genetic testing and patient care by defining the clinical relevance of genes and genetic sequence variants asserted to cause muscular dystrophies and myopathies. Using the frameworks and infrastructure of the NIH-funded Clinical Genome Resource, we will evaluate the clinical validity of the relationships between genes and muscular dystrophies and myopathies and assess the pathogenicity of individual variants in these genes. The outcomes of these efforts will support the development of more focused, consistent, and comprehensive multi-gene panels and clarify the diagnosis of patients to ensure their eligibility for impending therapies and clinical trials. These efforts will be iterative and build over time: The accumulation of variants with confirmed, FDA-approved classifications of pathogenicity will be used to further refine the criteria used to evaluate pathogenicity and to clinically validate large-scale functional assays, potentially replacing invasive muscle biopsy as a means of diagnostic clarification. In addition, proven assertions of gene-disease validity will lay the groundwork to assess the pathogenicity of variants in an increasing number of genes. This rigorous curation effort will provide the necessary foundation of comprehensive, standardized clinical genetic knowledge to advance therapy development and improve patient care.