Team Glut1

Million Dollar Bike Ride

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Team Glut1D - Hope in Motion V.3

About the MDBR and Team Glut1
The Glut1 Deficiency Foundation is honored to participate in the Million Dollar Bike Ride, an annual awareness and fundraising event from the Penn Medicine Orphan Disease Center (ODC). It is an amazing opportunity for participating rare disease teams to raise funds for pilot research grants for their diseases and to have those funds matched dollar for dollar by the ODC.  All donations through the Team Glut1 - Million Dollar Bike Ride campaign will be dedicated to this research grant program.

Typically, this event brings over 750 cyclists and volunteers to Penn's campus to ride either 13, 34, or 72 miles across the Greater Philadelphia region. It was a virtual event in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic and returned in 2022 for a hybrid event.  We embrace this unique opportunity to participate in a variety of ways from all over the world and are grateful to the MDBR for this wonderful and impactful opportunity.

History:
Team Glut1 started as Miles for Millie in 2016, a project from the Meisner family, who lives in the Philadelphia area, in support of their daughter, Millie.  They helped secure funding of $136,000 for research grants through their participation, and in 2020 they joined forces with the Glut1 Deficiency Foundation to create Team Glut1 so that the whole Glut1 community could take part in this incredible opportunity to drive research progress and double our impact.

2020:
Thanks to the support provided Team Glut1 and the Glut1 Deficiency Foundation in 2020, we were able to secure a $64,200 grant through the MDBR, which was awarded to Dr. Jason Park at UT Southwestern to support his ongoing work to screen potential FDA-approved drugs to activate Glut1 transporters.

2021:
The 2021 event resulted in a $64,465 grant to Dr. Christina Gurnett for multiplex analysis of variants for the SLC2A1 gene, which will study functional implications of variants and look for genotype-phenotype correlations.

2022:
Dr. Maoxue Tang was awarded $61,855 for his project titled Investigating Mechanisms Underlying Cognitive Dysfunction  in Glut1 Deficiency Syndrome. Learn more here.