Marley Binder, a former student at Camperdown’s Mercy Regional College and now a medical science PhD student at Deakin University in Geelong, helped promote the crowd-funding campaign that encouraged the public to use the Pozible website to donate online to the project.

Ms Binder said the university had resorted to crowd-funding because the DMD research was outside the projects for which it had received funding.

She said the money raised would allow an honours student to begin work on the project in March.

Under the guidance of Dr Dan McCulloch at Deakin’s School of Medicine, the student will research zebra fish, which are also prone to the disease. 

Dr McCulloch said current DMD therapies only worked short-term because they had negative side effects. 

Using the fish, the team hopes to re-analyse the effect of current treatments to find better therapies.

The team had aimed to raise about $8500 to buy aquarium equipment and other requisites to examine the effect of DMD treatments on the zebra fish. Ms Binder thanked all those who had donated to the campaign.

One of the motivations for Ms Binder’s support for the fund-raising campaign was her knowledge of the impact of DMD.

She attended Mercy Regional College with DMD sufferer Zach Clark who was wheelchair-bound from the age of eight.

Zach died in 2009, aged 19.