Personalized Medicine for SMA: a Translational Project

Major breakthroughs in the treatment for Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) have been recently achieved with various therapeutic approaches that increase full-length SMN protein levels. The variability observed following the advent of commercial availability of Nusinersen for all types of SMA has highlighted the need to identify tools that may allow to predict possible therapeutic responses. The aim of this project is to establish whether an integrated approach using clinical, imaging (muscle MRI) and circulating biomarkers, can provide the possibility to develop a predictive model of therapeutic response to novel therapies for SMA patients. More specifically we wish to establish the correlation between clinical response, different biomarkers indicative of central nervous system efficacy (e.g. determination of neurofilaments levels), and markers that provide evidence of the skeletal muscle response (e.g. serum myostatin and muscle imaging) in different types of SMA