New Treatment Reverses Multiple Sclerosis in Mice
About 400,000 people in the United States suffer from multiple sclerosis (MS), a devastating autoimmune disease that affects the nerves responsible for movement, sensation, and vision. Their treatment options are gravely limited, but that soon could change with new advances and more targeted therapies. We have the details.
MS is a devastating autoimmune disease that can lead to severe disability. Treatment options have been limited to immune system suppression, which can cause infections and other unpleasant side effects. Researchers believe they may have found a treatment that strictly attacks the T cells that have gone bad, sparing the rest of the immune system from attack.
What Is Multiple Sclerosis?
MS is an autoimmune disease that causes the body’s defenses to attack healthy nerve cells. There are different forms of the disease, but most people have a type called relapsing-remitting MS. Symptoms include numbness, reduced coordination, difficulty walking and painful sensations often described as comparable to electric shocks. Some sufferers experience temporary periods of partial or total blindness.
MS symptoms usually attack one side of the body at a time and can cause serious impairment. There isn’t a cure, and current treatments are limited, focusing on suppressing the immune system, which can lead to infection and a slew of nasty side effects.
New Targeted Therapy
But a new study has pinpointed a specific T cell that’s seemingly responsible for many MS symptoms.
T cells produce inflammatory proteins, called cytokines. In healthy people, cytokines help with healing wounds and fighting infections. For reasons not yet understood, MS causes the production of faulty T cells, which direct cytokines and other inflammatory proteins to attack the myelin sheath protecting the nerves.
The new targeted therapy may be able to destroy the destructive T cells while sparing the rest of the immune system. This is because researchers have found a unique protein, called CXCR6, seen only on the harmful T cell's outer surface. Medications designed to seek out and destroy CXCR6 can take out just the specific T cells they’re attached to.
The preliminary studies on mice look incredibly promising, but of course, more research is needed to determine whether similar treatments will work in humans. We’ll have more on this exciting new development as further studies become available.
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