This month it is halloween so today we have the Devil Firefish
Sculpture from the East End of London
This month it is halloween so today we have the Devil Firefish
Sculpture from the East End of London
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★ Black and Gray Hurricane Friday, #000000 #d3d3d3 I was kindly invited by David Martin the CEO of the MS Trust to participate in a Parliamentary round table meeting on Multiple Sclerosis on Tuesday. The meeting was chaired by Helen Hayes MP, who impressed me immensely and reassured me that the Labour party has some serious talent and committed MPs on the...
More of the same….anti-CD20 inhibits seroconversion, but there is a T cell response. Even if there is an antibody response it is of lower quality. Get vaccinated before anti-CD20 and the vaccine response is like controls. Time matters and the longer the interval between dose and vaccine more response. So I think it is safe to say we know this already….but prepared this has not...
Dr. Marton König (i.e. King in Norwegian) appeared on the blog earlier this week and is back again, to further show you what I have been saying for months. “If you want to optimise your antibody response on ocrelizumab you need to consider a delay”. This study is from the next-door neighbour of rituxiland and shows that if you are on rituximab it is perhaps worth considering a delay...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★★★Lime green and purple Thursday, #32cd32 & #6a0dad If you are on natalizumab and are JC virus seropositive, you are at increased risk of developing PML (progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy). If you transfer from 4-weekly infusions or standard interval dosing (SID) to 6-weekly or extended interval dosing (EID) you reduce the risk of getting PML by...
CD40 is a costimulatory protein (needed for activation of cells in addition to signalling via the antigen receptor) found on antigen-presenting cells including B cells, macrophages and dendritic cells. EBV induces B cell activation as it produces molecules that mimics the activation of B cell receptor (meaning that the B cell doesnt need to see its target for activation) and mimics the...
Today we have a post by Mark Baker and Lavinia Austerschmidt (Blizard Institute Queen Mary University of London) As you may know transport of sodium ions into nerves is a key mechanisms that allows nerves to transmit nerve impulses or action potentials. The action potential is the result of ions moving in and out of the cell. Specifically, it involves potassium (K+) and sodium (Na+) ions. The...
Disclosure seems to be the theme of many MS strands at the moment, so I thought I’d add my two-penn’orth. My only advantage is greater hindsight as I was diagnosed with MS 28y ago. More than half my life has been lived with the diagnosis and it is fair to say that it has influenced every single aspect of my life. Recently, I started to reflect on what that has meant. Some insights are very...
Apologises for interupting NDG day, but I think it is important news. I know you are all bored with COVID-19 but you have choices to make and therefore you need data. Here is some third dose-booster data (100 using rituximab, 1 ocrelizumab, and 29 fingolimod) and as I have predicted it is not good reading. Although some people who did not make a response after 2 doses made a response after 3, the...
You can read the full text of this review article for free on the internet, but in a nutshell the article is about secondary immunodeficiency after immunosuppressive treatments. Immunoglobulins or antibodies are produced at a basal level in all of us to protect against infections. However, when you are low in antibodies you’re at an increased risk of infections. This ranges from a common...
After Cladribine tablets had been rejected by regulators in 2010/11, Merck-Serono binned their respective development programme. This was in spite of excellent data on disease control and adverse events – if there hadn’t been those three cancers in the active arm of the CLARITY study (and none in the placebo arm). Although it subsequently turned out the malignancy risk with cladribine...