The Tucson-based Muscular Dystrophy Association has announced grants totaling $14.1 million to researchers around the world working to advance treatments for muscle and nerve diseases.

The grants will provide funding to thirty-eight researchers in twenty states, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. More than $6.9 million in grants will support the advancement of important muscular dystrophy research initiatives; $3.4 million will support ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease) research; and $600,000 will support the efforts of collaborative research initiatives to accelerate the development of therapeutic treatments for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and Friedreich's ataxia, two common neuromuscular diseases. With the grants, MDA has awarded nearly $39 million in 2010 to support research into treatments and cures for muscle diseases.

Grantees include Emory University clinical researcher Michael Benatar, who received $525,000 to study people who are at risk of developing ALS; Oliver Hobert, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Columbia University Medical Center, who received $375,000 to study a gene that was recently identified as a cause of some forms of ALS; University of Melbourne professor Gordon S. Lynch, who received $375,000 to study the cycles of muscle damage and repair in Duchenne muscular dystrophy; and University of California, San Diego researcher Albert La Spada, who received $330,000 to examine how neurons degenerate and why the degeneration is restricted to certain cell types in different diseases.

"Thanks to generous public support of MDA," said MDA chairman R. Rodney Howell, "we're able to keep funding vital muscle disease research at a time when such investments by government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private sources have tightened due to severe economic pressures."