Two UK centres are to be given £3.7 million to fund new treatments for people living with progressive MS, with the ambition that their disability can be slowed, stopped or ultimately reversed.
The MS Society centres in Cambridge and Edinburgh will be working together over the next five years to develop pioneering treatments for those who currently have nothing to stop their disability from deteriorating.
The two centres will be developing cutting-edge brain imaging techniques to test how effective drugs to repair myelin – the protective nerve coating which is damaged by MS – and protect nerves perform in clinical trials.
The MS Society Cambridge Centre for Myelin Repair aims to be the first MS centre in the world to routinely assess myelin in people with MS.
The Cambridge team will also build on their research on the impact of ageing on MS by studying myelin repair in people with MS of all ages, including children.
By looking at myelin repair across the human lifespan, the team hope to identify how the body’s natural ability to repair myelin changes with age, and work out how this could be used in the development of new myelin repair drugs.
“We are excited to build on the Cambridge centre’s strong foundations in developing new treatments for people with MS, and bring in what we believe will be a new era for MS treatment,” says Dr Thora Karadottir, who is leading the project alongside Professor Alasdair Coles.
“Thanks to this generous donation, we can make discoveries that will benefit people living with MS worldwide – including the myelin repair therapies that are still so desperately needed.”
Alongside this, the MS Society Centre for MS Research in Edinburgh will lead the development of a new drug-testing platform, which will use robots to screen thousands of possible treatments on zebrafish with an MS-like condition.
Potential treatments will also be tested on MS cells grown in a dish in the lab and on human brain tissue samples.
Using all these different methods together will help researchers prioritise treatments with the best chance of success in clinical trials.
“This pivotal investment from the MS Society will allow us to lead vital work in the study of nerve damage, which causes long-term disability in people living with MS,” says Professor Siddarthan Chandra, who is co-leading the work alongside Professors David Lyons, Anna Williams and Adam Waldman.
“We’ll be developing new ways to measure it, identifying new targets for treatments, and testing out the most promising in the lab.
“Our ultimate goal is that five years from now we’ll have substantially improved our understanding, and hopefully be beginning to translate this into new treatments that slow, stop or even reverse disability progression in MS.”
Emma Gray, assistant director of research at the MS Society, adds: “More than 130,000 people live with MS in the UK and our research has been vital in finding treatments for some of them.
“Today, we can see a future where nobody needs to worry about their MS getting worse – and our top priority is finding treatments that slow or stop MS for everyone.
“The work happening in Cambridge and Edinburgh is inventive, innovative and incredibly exciting, and will be vital to help us reach our goal.”
