March 31, 2010

One of the challenges that people diagnosed with MS have to deal with is deciding which (if any) disease-modifying therapy is right for them. This challenge will only get more difficult as more drugs are approved by the FDA for treating MS. Currently the process is based on trial and error, with the result that people with MS might spend months or years and lots of money on a treatment that isn't the best one for their own particular disease.

This week, new research findings were announced that may eventually help with this challenge. A collaborative team from Stanford, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and VU University Medical Center (Amsterdam) studied blood samples from people with MS who were about to start treatment with interferon-beta. The researchers had observed that mice with EAE induced by a certain type of T cell (Th1) responded well to IFN-beta, whereas mice with EAE induced by Th17 cells got worse with IFN-beta. So the MS samples were analyzed for levels of IL-17F, a protein produced by Th17 cells. Samples from the subjects whose MS hadn't responded to IFN-beta had higher pre-treatment levels of IL-17F than samples taken from responders. So perhaps IL-17 testing will provide a way to guide someone with MS to or away from IFN-beta treatment.

However, it should be noted that this study was extremely small (only 26 MS subjects were included). So these results must be confirmed in a larger study before any practical use can be made of them. If they are confirmed, it would be good to repeat this study, but this time with people who were on Copaxone, to see if that would be a helpful alternative for those with the IL-17 producing form of MS.