Just got off the phone with Eric Drew of The Eric Drew Foundation, a patient advocacy group based in California. Eric, the founder, was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (a rare and usually fatal disease). His personal story is here.
The Eric Drew Foundation serves people with serious and chronic illnesses by providing emotional support, small financial grants, and connects families with alternative resources, etc.
The ACTRIMS/ECTRIMS/LACTRIMS joint MS research conference takes place on 17 - 20 September in Montreal. The following link allows you to read the summaries of the various presentations / posters. Click on the link, then on 'Browse'. Then select the day (Thursday and Friday look the most interesting). Then click on 'scientific program'. Then select the presentation. The poster sessions (one Thursday and one Friday)have huge numbers of research summaries. There is a lot of research on the role of B cells and also on EBV.
I look forward to the summary of the event by Art and Hollie (I'm assuming they will be attending).
art: we'll be there, although Art needs to leave early this year, so much of it will be Hollie going solo
Fast-track designation could help development and speed the review process of dirucotide, for the treatment of secondary progressive MS, now being evaluated in a U.S. Phase 3 trial.
BioMS says about 510 patients have been recruited for the company's U.S. trial at 68 sites and will receive either dirucotide (MBP8298) or a placebo intravenously every six months for two years.
The MSAA Motivator has an excellent overview of current and upcoming therapies. If you can't keep track of everything on the radar, this is a good run-down of what's available and in the pipeline.
These researchers noticed that a certain group of patients experienced relapses within 24 hours of taking Tysabri. They only speculate as to reason, but it is an interesting observation that bears watching.
Vitamin D has been in the news a lot lately, seemingly fighting everything including MS. This study claims that the protective effect of vitamin D in MS may only be conferred to women.
As we enter the era of trying to remyelinate our CNS with therapies yet to be developed, the question still remains - how will we know they are working? Currently, imaging technologies are not able to show myelin precisely enough to know if a therapy was working or not.
This study concludes that certain VEP tests can be used as surrogate outcome measure for remyelination trials.
Pluristem Therapeutics Inc. a bio-therapeutics company dedicated to the commercialization of non-personalized (allogeneic) cell therapy products has announced that the Company's PLacental eXpanded (PLX-MS) cells have demonstrated in vivo efficacy in the prevention of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in mice.
This article about a grant mentions Modigene's interferon-beta-CTP (IFN-Beta-CTP / MOD-901) program, its longer-acting version of interferon beta. Not much info on the drug, but first I've heard of it, so I'm logging it here.
ATL1102 is a drug, similar to Tysabri, developed by Antisense Therapeutics.
On 30 June 2008 Teva and Antisense Therapeutics announced the results of the Phase IIa MS trial and reported that ATL/TV1102 (ne ATL1102) significantly reduced disease activity in patients with RRMS and that the Phase IIa study met its primary endpoint showing a significant reduction by 54.4% in cumulative number of new active lesions in patients taking ATL/TV1102 for 8 weeks, compared to placebo, as measured by magnetic resonance images (MRI). ATL/TV1102 demonstrated an increasing effect with time on the reduction of new active lesions over 12 weeks - one month after the completion of dosing.
