Stanford researchers from Prof. Helen Blau's laboratory have discovered that telomere length can be used as a diagnostic biomarker for cardiomyopathy or in drug screening assays with cardiomyocytes.
Dr. Helen Blau and colleagues have developed a mouse model that recapitulates both the skeletal muscle and cardiac pathology seen in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) patients.
There are two aspects to this invention, the RetroTet-ART vectors themselves, and the use of those vectors to identify novel regulatory elements (untranslated regions, or UTR's).