Symposium Speaker

Christopher Ward

Christopher Ward is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, USA. The focus of his research program is local Ca2+ signaling in both healthy and diseased striated muscle. One aspect of his research program is the role of mechano-transduction pathways as modulators of calcium signaling. This work, in conjunction with Drs. Prosser and Lederer at U Maryland Baltimore and Drs. Iribe and Kohl at Oxford University in the U.K., resulted in an exciting series of publications that culminated in a recent Science paper where we identified a novel microtubule dependent mechano-transduction pathway that activated NADPH Oxidase 2 dependent ROS production; a pathway we termed “X-ROS”.  Here we provided circumstantial evidence for X-ROS in the mechano-transduction induced calcium signaling dysfunction seen in the hearts of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Most recently with Dr. Khairallah and team we reported, in Science Signaling, a role for X-ROS in the skeletal muscle of murine model of DMD (mdx mouse) and provide evidence for X-ROS signaling components being up-regulated in humans with DMD.

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