Promising Results In Early Trial of Novel MS Treatment

Copyright 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. In the disease multiple sclerosis, the body's own immune cells stage a mutiny. Those cells, white cells, normally go after foreigners in the body like bacteria or other invaders that make us sick. But in MS, the immune cells go after the body itself, attacking the myelin covering that wraps around nerve cells. As that myelin gets degraded, nerve signals don't get transferred properly, and that's what leads to the symptoms of MS.

For years, scientists have been trying to figure out how to stop the myelin attack, to get the body to stop going after itself. This week, researchers say they have some very early promising results for a new approach. Essentially, they have a way to teach the body not to go after itself, and a small preliminary study says the technique is at least safe to use in a larger test. Stephen Miller is professor of microbiology-immunology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He's also a director of the Immunobiology Center at Northwestern in Chicago. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

DR. STEPHEN MILLER: Thank you, Ira. It's a pleasure to be here.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Let's begin a little bit - before you tell us what you did, explain very simplistically what MS is. Did I get that right?

MILLER: You did a great job, yeah. It's an autoimmune disease in which immune cells enter the central nervous system and attack the myelin membrane, the consequence being disruption of electrical signaling and the ensuing paralytic and other clinical symptoms of the disease.

FLATOW: How do they know - what exactly on the myelin in the cells, in the nerves are they attaching onto?

MILLER: Well, myelin is a very complex membrane made by a cell called an oligodendrocyte, and the oligodendrocyte puts out processes that wrap around nerve axons. And the real thing that myelin does is it facilitates the electrical conduction down those nerve axons. And being a complex membrane, there are multiple lipid and protein components within that membrane that end up being attacked by our immune system in this disease.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. So what you have done, at least in these early tests of nine people, seeing that it doesn't really hurt the people, is that you trick the body in a way into saying all those antigens that we normally attack, those are part of us. Let's not attack them.

Read more:
Promising Results In Early Trial of Novel MS Treatment