Major Breakthrough in MS Research

Doctors at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, have demonstrated a treatment that appears to totally reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis in laboratory mice, causing optimism that a similar treatment for the disease in people will follow from their incredible discovery.

In MS, the individual's immune system targets its own central nervous system. Existing treatments for the disease have been drug based so far, but this discovery involves relying not on medication but on modifying the body's own cells. In the case of this treatment discovery, a pair of proteins from the patient, when joined and reintroduced back into the system, appear to redirect and reverse the immune system functions that have gone awry in the course of the often debilitating illness.

The breakthrough involves the fusion of two proteins into a single compound entity, creating a course of treatment that Dr. Jacques Galipeau and his colleagues have fittingly named GIFT15. Dr. Galipeau sheds light on the nature of their discovery in an interview with Science Daily:

"You know those mythical animals that have the head of an eagle and the body of a lion? They're called chimeras. In a lyrical sense, that's what we've created. GIFT15 is a new protein hormone composed of two distinct proteins, and when they're stuck together they lead to a completely unexpected biological effect."

Reintroduction of this altered compound protein into afflicted mice was determined to cause the disease to disappear altogether.

As further detailed in Science Daily, and published in the journal Nature Medicine, these two proteins will each, and independently, act in the body to activate the immune response, but in their combined form, surprisingly, they set the immune response in reverse course.

Photo courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory, via Wikimedia Commons