For UCLA-based startup, new muscular dystrophy treatment is a personal mission

Courtney Young helped develop the gene therapy at the heart of a biotech startup,MyoGene Bio, when she was a doctoral student at UCLA from 2013 to 2018. But the kernel of the company ’s endeavor is older still — and definitively personal.In 2008, when Young was in high school, she found out that her cousin, then just a toddler, had been diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. She made it her mission to cultivate the skills needed to provide better options for him and others who were suffering with the deadly muscle-wasting disease.“I directed my career toward working on Duchenne,” said Young, MyoGene Bio’s co-founder and CEO. “I came to UCLA specifically because there’s a high concentration of researchers working on the disease. My advisers and I decided to develop a novel treatment that targets the primary cause of disease, because we really wanted to make a meaningful impact on the lives of Duchenne patients.”Young now pursues that goal close to her earlier scientific home, because MyoGene Bio is based at theMagnify incubator in theCalifornia NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. Her company reached the finals of the 2021 University of California Startup Innovation Challenge, a contest for startups with at least one founder affiliated with UC. Young also will be among six entrepreneurs featured at theUC Biotech Investor Demo Day on March 11.Building on all of that momentum, Young is now seeking venture capital funding and conducting preclinical research. Her ai...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news