Hansell Stedman and his team draw on personal experience at the extremes of muscle function—world-class athleticism and muscular dystrophy—as they strive to develop a safer gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
2 min. read
Hansell Stedman knows what’s happening in his leg muscles as he sprints up a snow-covered hill and skates down the other side.
As a competitive cross-country skier, he draws on decades of athletic experience. But he also understands muscle at the molecular level—the identity of the muscle fibers powering his climb, for instance, and how these fibers switch to a less efficient metabolic pathway that produces lactic acid.
Hansell Stedman is a professor of surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine.
(Image: Margo Reed)
By working his legs, pushing them outward in strokes like those of an ice skater, rather than gliding down the hill, he also knows he can force his muscle cells to burn that lactic acid. This strategy, while painful, can power a second wind that will give him an edge on his competitors.
Stedman, a professor of surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, learned this and much more over four decades of studying muscle function in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), the disease that took the lives of his two brothers.
In the late 1980s, when Stedman was a surgical resident, geneticists identified the gene that is altered in DMD and determined its sequence. The discovery opened the door to finally understanding how the disease damages and eventually destroys muscle. Stedman recognized that the goal he and others had long sought—curing DMD—might be possible.
As a skier, not just a scientist, he saw an added benefit. “There's a dividend here,” he says, “because it’ll allow me to compete in a muscle physiology-driven sport by understanding how to focus on what matters most in training and recovery.”
Stedman has been racing for 50 years, with the goal of competing in the Masters World Cup and Winter World Masters Games “as long as there’s any natural snow left,” while pursuing what he calls the “quest for the Holy Grail,” a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He has built a lab in the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute at Penn Medicine in which muscle research and personal experience inform each other, a dynamic reflected in the people who have joined him. They include an elite rower who looked to her athletic training to design experiments, and a fourth-year student with DMD who has been both researcher and therapy recipient. Together, they are working to give dystrophic muscles more resilience—in effect, to restore to them some of the durability that protects those of an athlete.
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