Frank Ryan's Blog - Posts Tagged "ms"
Remarkable New Therapy Aimed At Curing MS
Four different scientific centres worldwide, including my local Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, are involved in a radical new treatment of MS. This treatment is aimed at combating the autoimmune nature of the disease, which involves the body’s immune system damaging the covering sheath, known as “myelin”, which coats nerves within the brain and spinal chord. The new therapy involves administering a drug to encourage stem cells to move into the blood stream from the bone marrow. These are then harvested from the patient's blood and stored. The next step involves destroying the cells in the bone marrow that store the memory of the body’s immune system – in other words the cells that remember how the immune system reacted to foreign invaders, including the mistaken attack on the body’s own myelin. When this is complete, the stored stem cells are reinjected into the patient’s blood, from where they reinvade the bone marrow and, rather like a computer that has been switched off and then on again, they reboot the immune system starting again from scratch. Thus the faulty reaction to the body’s own myelin should in theory be erased.
Does it work?
It’s early days but the preliminary findings in small numbers of patients appears to be promising.
Even if it works, will it prove too costly for the many sufferers throughout the world?
The anti-autoimmune therapy appears to be no more expensive than a single year’s treatment with many of the current oral and injection therapies for MS.
Will it have implications for the many other autoimmune conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, DLE, autoimmune diabetes, and so on?
The answer is it might well prove important – but this remains to be tested.
The Mysterious World of the Human Genome
Does it work?
It’s early days but the preliminary findings in small numbers of patients appears to be promising.
Even if it works, will it prove too costly for the many sufferers throughout the world?
The anti-autoimmune therapy appears to be no more expensive than a single year’s treatment with many of the current oral and injection therapies for MS.
Will it have implications for the many other autoimmune conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, DLE, autoimmune diabetes, and so on?
The answer is it might well prove important – but this remains to be tested.
The Mysterious World of the Human Genome
