Promising Experimental Treatments for Multiple Sclerosis

 

What’s on the horizon for people with multiple sclerosis? Dedicated doctors, scientists, and volunteers are working today to answer that question and find tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

Several experimental treatments are being studied to figure out whether they’re safe and effective for people with different kinds of multiple sclerosis (MS) and at different points in their journey.

The main research goals are to find new ways to stop MS from getting worse or even to reverse nerve damage and the disability that can come with it. Eventually, the hope is to end MS forever.

That’s a tall order for sure, but progress is being made in laboratories and medical centers all around the world.

Resetting Your Immune System

When you have multiple sclerosis, your immune system attacks your central nervous system. So what if doctors could flush out your “bad” immune system and give you a new one? That’s the basic idea behind a type of bone marrow transplant called autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant (AHSCT).

How does this work? Thrower explains it this way:

• Immature stem cells made in your bone marrow are removed from your blood.
• These cells are sort of cloned and many copies are made.
• The bad immune system’s “hard drive” is wiped clean with high-dose chemotherapy.
• The immune system is rebooted with the fresh stem cells that don’t attack your nervous system.

Since they’re your cells, they can’t be rejected. But it will take your body about a month to replace your immune system. That puts you at risk of potentially life-threatening infections, including COVID-19 and others.

The procedure is not new but not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It could be soon, says Ben Thrower, MD, a neurologist and medical director of the Andrew C. Carlos MS Institute at Shepherd Center in Atlanta and senior medical advisor for the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation.

In fact, the National Institutes of Health is sponsoring a clinical trial comparing AHSCT against the most widely used and effective treatments for relapsing-remitting MS.

Even though AHSCT isn’t approved, experts know a lot about the best candidates for this ambitious therapy. It’s most successful in people with aggressive relapsing-remitting MS who are under age 50, according to Thrower.

This is the same procedure actress Selma Blair had in 2019, he adds. Her journey is the subject of a 2021 documentary called Introducing, Selma Blair.

Talk to your neurologist about whether you should try AHSCT. Many Americans go to other countries for this treatment.

Other New Stem Cell Approaches

Doctors are exploring other stem cell approaches. One stem cell transplant therapy being tried at Atlanta’s Shepherd Center is intended to treat all types of MS: relapsing-remitting, primary progressive, and secondary progressive. The procedure uses what’s called mesenchymal stem cells. It may be able to repair damage and reverse disability.

Mesenchymal cells are more mature than embryonic stem cells, which have a better ability to repair but are risky. “Once you put embryonic cells into the body, you lose control and you can’t take them out once they’re in. They can turn into cancerous cells or tissue you don’t want them to develop into,” Thrower says.

“Embryonic stem cells are like a genie in a bottle, you don’t know whether you’ll get a good genie or a bad genie,” he says.

Mesenchymal cells offer more control and are safer to use. The trial in Atlanta infuses these cells into volunteers through a vein. Unlike AHSCT, it doesn’t destroy the immune system.

But the jury is still out on this approach. It’s only in the first phase of research, so it’s years away from becoming an approved treatment.