David Allen was born in Canberra but brought up and educated in London where he studied Medicine and Physiology at University College London. As a post-doctoral fellow at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, he made the first measurements of intracellular calcium in the heart and showed that calcium regulated the force of contraction of the heart. Returning to University College London he published a series of studies defining the role of intracellular calcium in the response of the heart to muscle length, pH, ischaemia and many drugs. He was appointed to the Chair of Physiology at the University of Sydney in 1989 and in recent years has studied the effects of fatigue and muscle damage in skeletal muscle.

Muscle damage caused by stretch: Role in muscular dystrophy
by Professor David Allen

If you walk down a mountain, you may experience pain and stiffness in your leg muscles the following day. This is an example of mild stretch-induced muscle damage from which normal people recover rapidly. Muscular dystrophy is a common and serious inherited disease of muscle causing profound weakness which can eventually results in death due to respiratory and cardiac failure. It is caused by a mutation in the gene for a muscle protein called dystrophin. When dystrophin was discovered in 1988 it was hoped that gene therapy would eventually provide a cure for the disease but, despite intense efforts and much progress, this has not yet occurred. We are studying the pathways by which absence of dystrophin causes muscle damage and weakness. Muscles in muscular dystrophy are also damaged by stretch, but the damage is much more severe and recovery incomplete. A novel stretch-activated channel shows increased activity in muscular dystrophy and we believe the entry of calcium into the muscles by this route contributes to muscle damage. Existing drugs block this pathway and provide the possibility of treatment that reduces the muscle damage.

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