Encouraging news from Canada on treating this debilitating disease. Not sure how fast this treatment will become available as the profile motive doesn’t seem to be very strong in this approach.
Eliminating MS completely and watching patients improve surprised both Freedman and Dr. Harold Atkins, a bone-marrow transplant expert, who started the study. The two originally set out to monitor the development of the disease and find a way to treat it. Their theory was this: Wipe out the entire immune system, reboot it with a transplant of the patient’s own bone marrow and wait for MS to regenerate.
“We thought we might be able to intercept one of the signals that initiates the disease and that would then give us a clue on how to treat it,†Freedman said. He jokes that they “had, in effect, failed because the disease never came back. No one expected to see zero disease activity after the transplant.â€