DigiGait Tackles Childhood Diseases

BOSTON, Nov. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Mouse Specifics, Inc. [MSI] announced that the Animal Resources facility at Children's Hospital Boston is providing MSI's DigiGait ventral plane videography technology for gait analysis to Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School scientists. Children's Hospital Boston has purchased two DigiGait Imaging Systems, dedicated to the study of mouse and rat models of human childhood diseases.

"We are pleased about the placement of the DigiGait instrumentation at Children's Hospital," said MSI CEO Dr. Thomas Hampton. "These Harvard researchers will have exceptional tools with which to study their animal models of developmental disorders that affect how children crawl, walk, run, and fall."

Children's Hospital Boston is home to the world's leading pediatric research center, with over $200 million in annual funding and 750,000 square feet of space. At Children's Hospital, hundreds of Harvard Medical School scientists are identifying factors that contribute to childhood and adult diseases, and developing effective treatments for them. Animal Resources at Children's Hospital [ARCH] is a veterinarian-supervised facility that supports Children's Hospital investigators in accomplishing their research objectives. ARCH provides animal husbandry, animal care-and-use training, safety monitoring, and access to life sciences technology. DigiGait will be utilized to identify and quantify postural and kinematic abnormalities in animal models of human genetic disorders, such as muscular dystrophy and spinal muscular atrophy.

The DigiGait Imaging System is patented non-invasive instrumentation licensed by Pharmaceutical Companies, including Pfizer and Merck, Biotechnology Companies, including Genzyme and Vertex, and Academic Centers, including Yale and Northwestern University. The DigiGait Imaging System at The Children's Hospital Boston underscores the capacity of the technology to detect early symptoms of subtle gait disorders. DigiGait reports numerous spatial and dynamic metrics of locomotion in mice, rats, guinea pigs, and hamsters walking overground, on a treadmill, at a range of speeds, uphill, and downhill, to characterize potential defects and to accelerate the development of corrective therapies.

Dr. Kathleen Sweadner, a Harvard Medical School Researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, said, "DigiGait has been very useful in our research of rapid-onset dystonia-Parkinsonism in its ability to detect quantifiable gait disturbances in genetically-modified animal models of the human inherited disease. I am confident that my colleagues at The Children's Hospital will find numerous opportunities for quantitative assessment of posture and gait in a range of models."

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