FORMER Cobden woman Marley Binder knows the impact that Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) can have.
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She went to Mercy Regional College in Camperdown with Zach Clark who had DMD and was wheelchair-bound since he was eight.
Zach died in 2009 at the age of 19. So Ms Binder, now a medical science PhD student at Deakin University in Geelong, is pleased to be part of a team trying to find a cure for DMD.
The team, led by Dr Dan McCulloch at Deakin’s School of Medicine, is hoping to use the crowd-funding website Pozible to help fund its research.
The team wants to do research on zebra fish that are also prone to the disease and do not swim correctly. It wants to raise nearly $8000 to buy aquarium equipment and other requisites to examine the effect of DMD treatments on the fish.
Dr McCulloch said current DMD therapies only worked short-term because they had bad side effects.
The team hopes to re-analyse the effect of current treatments, using the fish, to find better therapies.
The team has so far raised more than $3000 through Pozible but has less than two weeks before its time on the website expires. DMD is the most common form of muscular dystrophy and mainly affects boys.
People interested in supporting the team’s research can go to its Pozible website at www.pozible.com/fish4dmd
