Over 90,000 people in the UK cannot control their own muscles—dystonia twists their bodies into painful, involuntary postures, sometimes starting just weeks after birth. This research tackles a fundamental gap: no one knows exactly how dystonia arises at the molecular or cellular level. Without that knowledge, treatments remain limited. The researcher is using fruit flies—animals with a uniquely fast and powerful genetic toolkit—to build new models of the disease. These flies show dystonia-like movement problems and altered neural circuit activity, allowing the team to trace the cellular pathways that cause the disorder. If successful, this work could identify entirely new drug treatments for dystonia. Because dystonia frequently co-occurs with other conditions—Parkinsonism, epilepsy, autism, intellectual disability—insights here might also illuminate those disorders. The researcher has built a network of collaborators working on human genetics, neurophysiology, and mouse models, so any discoveries in flies can be rapidly tested in mammalian systems. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a new drug tomorrow. But without understanding what goes wrong inside the cells that control movement, effective therapies remain guesswork.
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Maintaining control over bodily movements is critical for our wellbeing. Many neurological diseases, however, result in a loss of such control, diminishing quality of life. Here, I focus on one such disease that is prevalent yet poorly understood: dystonia. Dystonia is characterised by involuntary muscle contractions that result in twisted, contorted postures. Over 90,000 patients in the UK alone suffer from this disease. Dystonic movements are frequently painful and may begin at an early age - in some cases, just weeks after birth. Furthermore, dystonia is often associated with additional disease symptoms, including other movement disorders such as Parkinsonism, ataxia, dyskinesia, and myoclonus; and non-movement-related disorders such as epilepsy, autism, intellectual disability and developmental delay. Unfortunately, therapeutic options to treat dystonia are limited. This is primarily due to a lack of understanding regarding the fundamental molecular and cellular basis of involuntary movements in this disorder. In this Fellowship application, I describe a series of approaches to uncover such mechanisms using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster - a model organism with unparalleled rapidity of use and a hugely powerful toolkit that readily enables manipulations of both genes and neural circuits. I introduce a novel Drosophila model of dystonia; demonstrate that this model exhibits dystonia-like alterations in movement and the activity of neural circuits that influence movement; and show how this model can be used to uncover cellular pathways that cause dystonia. I propose to confirm the broader relevance of our findings by generating a new array of Drosophila dystonia models, and to utilise these models to identify novel drug treatments. Furthermore, I have built a unique network of national and international collaborators specialising in the study of dystonia genetics, neurophysiology, and mouse models of the disease. This network will allow me to greatly increase translational impact by using our results to guide studies in human and mammalian systems, to confirm the validity of potential drug treatments in mammalian dystonia models. Implementation of my experimental strategy promises to greatly enhance our understanding of how dystonic movement arise, and uncover novel therapeutic methods to treat this debilitating disorder. Achieving these goals may also shed light on the large number of neurological diseases that are frequently co-morbid with dystonia.
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