The NMD-chip project (contract no. 223026), led by Professor Nicolas Lévy (Marseille), was funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under a call for “high throughput molecular diagnostics".
The aim of NMD-chip was to design, develop and validate new sensitive highthroughput DNA arrays to efficiently diagnose patients affected by NMDs, specifically Duchenne / Becker muscular dystrophies (DMD/BMD), limb girdle muscular dystrophies (LGMD), congenital muscular dystrophies (CMD), and hereditary motor-sensory neuropathies or Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathies (CMT).
The new sensitive and reliable tools originating from this project allows the assessment of all known genes implicated in a group of diseases at one time, and the efficient analysis of chip data through optimized read-out bioinformatic tools providing results within 72 hours to one week and thus be cheaper than any “gene by gene” approach. It is anticipated that the development of these NMD-chips could allow the cost of molecular diagnostics to be decreased by a factor of 10.
The NMD-Chip project officially came to an end in 2011 however the project's website is still accessible providing further details and the project's final report.
Nicolas Lévy, University Professor and Hospital Practitioner in Genetics, INSERM, France
