Queen Square Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases 10th Anniversary Symposium

The 10th anniversary symposium of the Queen Square Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases was held at the Royal College of Physicians on 8^th November. 

Our progress over the past ten years has been substantial: all clinical services have grown from assessing 1,000 patients per year to over 6,000 per year. We now have three national commissioned highly specialised services, and developed a brand new Neuromuscular Complex Care Centre, which is an innovative care model for patients with disabling complex neuromuscular diseases. Our total clinical and research staff have grown from ten to over one hundred.

We have seen our research income exceed £30million from external funding bodies over the past ten years including the Medical Research Council, Wellcome, NIHR and NIH (USA). Our MRC funded Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases was funded for ten years until 2018, and we have recently obtained a further five year MRC grant for an International Centre for Genomic Medicine in Neuromuscular Diseases (ICGNMD) together with UK colleagues in ICH, Cambridge and Newcastle, and international colleagues in Brazil, India, South Africa, Zambia and Turkey. We have published over 1,500 peer-reviewed research publications including in top tier journals such as Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature journals, Lancet Neurology, American Journal of Human Genetics and Brain.

Improving the lives of patients and families remains absolutely at the centre of all our activities, and we have an active patient engagement programme.

The next ten years promises to be even more exciting as we enter a new era of genetic disease-modifying therapies for our patients with many different genetic neuromuscular diseases. These therapies have not started to be licenced, and as more are developed we expect to be at the forefront of the development and delivery for our patients.

We are very proud of the great team that we have built, and are extremely grateful to all the partners and stakeholders who have been pivotal in supporting our progress, especially University College London Hospitals NHS Trust and University College London.