Basil Darras, MD

Dr. Basil Darras focuses on treating children with neuromuscular diseases, which present as problems of motor development and
He is an Associate neurologist-in-Chief at Boston Children's Hospital and hold the Joseph J. Volpe Chair in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He is also the Chief of the division of clinical neurology in the Department of Neurology at the hospital. For 11 years, he ran the hospital's neurology residency training program and was twice voted teacher of the year by neurology residents. His special focus is in the care of children with neuromuscular conditions originating from inherited or acquired conditions of the motor unit. These include patients with complex muscle diseases like muscular dystrophies and congenital or metabolic myopathies, neuromuscular transmission defects, neuropathies, motor neuronopathies, and also inflammatory muscle or nerve conditions. Further, Dr. Darras sees patients with general neurological problems such seizures when he attends …on the inpatient neurology services. Following medical school in Greece and residencies in pediatrics and child neurology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Tufts Medical Center, respectively. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale in genetics, which gives him a unique lens through which he approaches problems of childhood motor development.When he was training in neurology, he gravitated toward neuromuscular cases. The fact that many have a genetic basis appealed to me. He felt that there was a higher probability of finding a treatment if we could understand the pathogenesis of the diseases.At Boston Children's Hospital, he is proud to be involved with two innovative multi-disciplinary clinical programs. He directs the Neuromuscular Program, which provides diagnostic evaluation and therapeutic services for children with neuromuscular diseases and is one largest of its kind in the country; and the Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) Clinical Research Program, which seeks to improve medical care of children with SMA and discover new treatments for this devastating motor neuron disease.Through his clinical and research experience, as well as his hospital leadership roles, he has influenced care in the field of pediatric neuromuscular diseases both nationally and internationally.