NMD-Chip

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.