Experimental MS treatment halts disease in its tracks

Originally published January 11, 2015 at 12:13 AM | Page modified January 11, 2015 at 1:55 PM

Seven years ago, Mike Kearny of Seattle was so sick and weak from multiple sclerosis, he had to use the handrail to pull himself up the stairs of his Wallingford neighborhood home.

Daily injections of powerful drugs hadnt slowed the neurodegenerative disease; tests showed growing numbers of lesions in his brain. The once-active cyclist and climber started missing work as a cardiac catheter lab nurse, and worse activities with his wife, Casey Castaneda, and his boys, Owen, then 2, and Jack, 7.

I was not doing well, recalled Kearny, now 47, who was first diagnosed in 2006.

So when local doctors offered a gamble on an experimental treatment that aimed to use high-dose chemotherapy and stem-cell transplants to stop multiple sclerosis (MS), Kearny took the chance.

Five years later, he says joining the small-but-promising HALT-MS clinical trial led by Seattle researchers was the best bet he ever made.

The opportunity I was given now feels like a gift, said Kearny, who was treated in December 2009 and has seen no progress of the disease since.

It stopped it in its tracks, he added.

Kearny is one of two dozen patients enrolled in the five-year clinical trial that gets its catchy acronym, HALT-MS, from a long title: High-Dose Immunosuppressive Therapy and Autologous Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation for Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis.

The procedures, abbreviated as HDIT and HCT, are the focus of the multicenter trial that includes experts from seven U.S. states, plus Canada and England.

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Experimental MS treatment halts disease in its tracks