The ABN meeting took place this year in Harrogate, North Yorkshire and was well attended by neurologists and pharma colleagues alike. The Town is very familiar to MD (aka. Prof David Baker) who has come through it all without any visible misgivings. The meeting was packed with a lot of discussions on current and upcoming MS clinical trials, service provision in the UK and treatment guidelines on...
Every now and then we get an unusual paper that draws me like a magnet. If you have a few million squid to blow….you may be considering lining the pockets of Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson for a trip into space….but as you go weight-less, I guess you are pondering what does space do to your oligodendrocytes….Fear not someone has been looking at this….and you can read it...
For many years the MS community has been extremely sceptical about the importance of EBV in the cause of multiple sclerosis, but following a couple of papers last year (one compelling, the other not really) and the MS World woke up to stuff prof G has been banging on about for years. Moderna who have made a COVID-19 vaccine have an EBV vaccine in trial. Here they look at another vaccine that is...
ASCEND is a clinical trial of natalizumab in secondary progressive MS and based on looking at EDSS (a walking scale at the point tested) the trial failed and natalizumab was, in the eyes of many neuros, chucked on the maggot pile as far as treating progressive MS has been concerned. However, this view has been challenged based on response to changes in hand function and in relation to effects on...
By Dominic Shadbolt (theMSguide.com) This is a follow-up to an article recently published on the MS Research Blog that you can read here. Like much of life, people like the simple binary explanations. A is bad and B is good. Multiple Sclerosis has been tarred by this need for simplification. Cancer kills, MS doesn’t is the rough equivalent. Now the requirement for understanding the...
Thyroid dysfunction is the commonest treatment related side effect after alemtuzumab. Alemtuzumab targets CD52 on the surface of T and B cells taking them out of circulation. The precursor cells to the adult T and B cells are left intact because of their lack of the CD52 surface marker. After cell depletion, which occurs very quickly there is then a period of immune reconstitution resulting in...
Some of you feel they are no more than talking shops, but conversations at conferences sometimes do produce results, for example a new trial – AttackMS is such a product. The next domestic highlight in any UK MSologists’ diary is the MS Society’s MS Frontiers meeting hosted on the Bay Campus of Seaside University Swansea, on 6th and 7th of July. I provided some details back in...
This study is about hunting for antibody bands in lumbar punctures and suggests there is limited value in repeat assays….This may be the case for bands but looking for other things like neurofilaments to indicate worsening Repeated lumbar puncture in search of oligoclonal bands – What is the yield? Mermelstein M, Naftali J, Wilf-Yarkoni A, Lotan I, Hellmann MA, Steiner I.J Neurol Sci...
What is going on in MS? One person has an idea, another one has a different idea. What is the Real MS? We have heard this many, many times. Outside in (immune system issue comes from the outside -in) or the problems starts on the inside (inside out). I have long said this is a sterile argument as the key events have probably occurred before we even know MS has started so to look ages later is...
To those familiar to the blog they will know what neurofilament is but simply put is is a structural protein only found inside nerves. So if you can detect it in biological fluids it says a nerve has got damaged. This study says neurofilament levels in blood predict a worse course. This is abit NSS because if disability is a product of previous nerve damage, then if you can measure markers of...
As you know we have been called the Clad Lads and so it is appropriate for us to see what this real world cladribine says. In addition if you are eligible for Chariot MS please consider volunteering ChariotMS – Cladribine to Halt Deterioration in People With Advanced Multiple Sclerosis (ChariotMS). NCT04695080 What does this study say when they are looking at the real world data? I will...