PGIMER doctor wins national award for research on rare muscle diseases in children

CHANDIGARH: A PGIMER Chandigarh doctor who treats and studies children with rare muscle-wasting diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) has won a national award for young neuroscientists.

Dr Renu Suthar, Additional Professor in the Pediatric Neurology Unit of PGIMER’s Department of Pediatrics, received the Dr Ashok Panagariya Young Neuroscientist Award 2026 at IANCON 2026, the 33rd annual conference of the Indian Academy of Neurology. The conference was held in Jaipur from October 29 and ended on Sunday.

The award is named after the late Prof Ashok Panagariya, a noted neurologist and Padma Shri recipient. It is given to young neurologists in India for outstanding research. Dr Suthar was chosen for her work in paediatric neurology, especially on improving how neuromuscular disorders in children are diagnosed, treated and managed over the long term.

These disorders weaken the nerves and muscles that control movement. They affect one in every 2,500 children, and 95% of them begin in childhood. The most common include SMA, DMD, limb-girdle muscular dystrophy, inherited neuropathies and myasthenia gravis.

Dr Suthar has worked on randomised controlled trials in DMD, a disease that slowly wastes the muscles. She has also tracked how children with SMA fare over the years in real-world conditions. Her studies link specific gene faults to the way the illness shows up in a child, in childhood-onset muscular dystrophies and congenital myasthenic syndromes.

Her work also covers sudden-onset conditions. She has added to what doctors know about treating and rehabilitating children with Guillain-Barré syndrome and chronic inflammatory demyelinating neuropathy, both of which attack the nerves.

She has been part of multi-centre disease registries and has studied new disease-modifying therapies, which aim to slow or change the course of an illness rather than only ease symptoms.

The larger goal of her work is to take new science from the lab to the hospital bed faster. That means better standard care for these children, wider access to proven treatments, and clear care guidelines for doctors handling rare neurological diseases.

Dr Suthar did her MD in Pediatrics and DM in Pediatric Neurology at PGIMER, where she now teaches and practises.