Podcasts about scientific operations

Send us a textThis week Fertility in Focus is thrilled to welcome Jullin Fjeldstad from Future Fertility and Dr. Sony Sierra from Evolve Egg Freezing Clinic, who sat down with us to discuss how they're bringing their unique expertise to the forefront of reproductive technology. These esteemed guests illuminate how AI is reshaping fertility preservation, specifically through the lens of egg freezing. Dr. Sierra provides a compelling overview of how egg freezing empowers individuals to align their reproductive plans with personal and professional aspirations, amidst a growing trend on social media. As more people turn to fertility preservation, understanding its benefits and implications becomes paramount. With insights from both of our guests this week, we explore how AI not only improves clinical outcomes but also offers patients unprecedented control and understanding over their fertility journeys.More about our guest speakers: Jullin Fjeldstad is the Head of Clinical Embryology and Scientific Operations at Future Fertility. Throughout her career, she has always held a passion for innovative ART technologies aimed at improving the fertility journey and IVF outcomes. In her current multi-faceted role, Jullin draws upon her experience as a seasoned embryologist and former lab director to navigate partnering clinics through seamless adoption of Future Fertility's AI-powered oocyte quality assessment tools, as well as overseeing Future Fertility's scientific project collaborations. With her extensive IVF experience and comprehensive understanding of the laboratory operations, she also provides invaluable input to the company's product development processes. Jullin holds a BSc. in Biology from the University of Victoria, Canada and a MSc. in Clinical Embryology from the University of Leeds, UK, where she achieved distinction in both areas.  Dr. Sony Sierra, MD, FRCSC, REI (She/Her), serves as a distinguished Reproductive Endocrinology & Infertility Specialist (REI) and Deputy Medical Director and Partner at TRIO. With nearly two decades of experience, she specializes in reproductive health, recurrent pregnancy loss, and early Recurrent Pregnancy Loss (RPL) programs. As the Medical Director at EVOLVE Egg Freezing Clinic and an Associate Physician at Women's College Hospital, she contributes significantly to advancing reproductive medicine. Dr. Sierra's research interests include infertility, implantation failure, and PCOS, reflected in her publications and conference presentations. Passionate about patient care, she approaches her practice with compassion and dedication, guided by her belief in excellence and empathy. Dr. Sierra's commitment to ongoing education and involvement in esteemed societies ensures her patients receive the most up-to-date care and expertise. She finds immense fulfillment in helping individuals and couples achieve their dreams of starting a family, making her a valued asset in the field of fertility medicine.For more info about Dr. Sierra, you can check out the TRIO Fertility Website: https://triofertility.com/team-member/sony-sierra/ or you can follow her on Instagram @drsonysierra. https://futurefertility.com/https://instagram.com/futurefertilityaihttps://www.youtube.com/@futurefertilityIf you or your organization would like to sponsor educational episodes just like this, please contact us at podcast@fertilitymatters.ca. Follow Fertility Matters Canada at @fertility_canada on Instagram and TikTok.

This week I sat down with Krisha Panchalingham, Director of Lab and Scientific Operations at Portal Innovations. Krisha shares how she and her team support early-stage biotech companies through the operational intricacies of setting up labs, handling logistics, maintaining equipment, and complying with regulations. We also discuss the importance of vendor management, the role of external consultants, and the strategic partnerships required to efficiently run lab operations. Krisha also emphasizes the significance of mentorship and the strategic role of operational support in the success of biotech startups. We also discuss how Portal Innovations fosters a nurturing ecosystem for biotech startups, underscoring the balance between scientific discovery and operational excellence.Get Krisha's recommended book! A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (Official Guides to the Appalachian Trail)Boston Globe: The promise of biotech jobs is coming to Boston's neighborhoods - MassBioLink In with Krisha!Portal Innovations LLCConnect with us!Link In with CarinaSubscribe here:AppleSpotifyGoogle PodcastRSS feedLearn more about Recruitomics ConsultingCheck out our reading listDownload our free startup resources guide to grow your biotech efficientlyIf you're on the job market, visit the Collaboratory Career Hub

In this Sidebar episode, we hear from Amii Fellow Xingyu Li about her work in using AI to highlight vital information in medical data. Xingyu shares insights into her work on visual anomaly detection and navigating the complexities of AI in healthcare while safeguarding patient privacy. She talks with Adam White, Amii's Director of Scientific Operations about how to do more with scarce data, and the future of AI-driven medicine.

Join the Nerdy Neurologist and her super friends Ashley M. Ratcliff, Director of Communications & Operations with WE Are Ill, Stewart Schlossman, President and Founder of MS News and Views, and Hollie Schmidt, VP of Scientific Operations for Accelerated Cure Project.

Olon Ricerca Bioscience is a US-based Contract Research Organisation (CRO) offering speciality chemical manufacturing capabilities. We spoke to Alessandro Agosti, Senior Director of Scientific Operations about how they partner with customers, and some of the ways they are unique.  The CRO was founded 1986, before being acquired by Olon SpA in 2017.   Now part of the wider Olon Group, Alessandro explains that "clients can tap into a 'One stop shop' taking them from early phase work to scaling up into full commercial manufacturing - leveraging Olon's technologies and the centre of excellence." Speed of development is a top requirement, says Alessandro, providing the example of a recent collaboration with a US-based pharma company to develop an oncology drug. They escalated from a very early phase to full GMP manufacturing within one year. "It was a quite a big jump in terms of scale. It was made possible because of the continuous interaction between the different teams fine-tuning the process, the analytical work, as well as the process engineering that is inevitably needed when you go from a few 100 grammes to manufacturing batches on on large scale on a chemical on a chemical plant." "A trend that that we are seeing from many clients is the requirement to move research and manufacturing away from the Far East" says Alessandro. While acknowledging this comes with a higher price tag, moving research to the United States is "has clear advantages in terms of control and interaction with customers", adding that it's more important than ever "to deliver first time and keep to the timeline in these very challenging times." "We like to provide clients with a roadmap for their development, partnering from a very eary stage. This includes the way we write the proposal, the way we try to understand the client's most immediate needs. That will drives and impact the way we do the process development." "We want to think that there might be a much larger scale, scale up required further down the road, and we believe that establishing a partnership and providing a process package rather than selling a product is the key to a successful working relationship."

Welcome to the 18th episode of Season 4 of the Fertility Conversations Podcast.  . Today we are joined by a lovely Guest; Jullin Fjeldstad.  Jullin is the the Head of Clinical Embryology and Scientific Operations at Future Fertility.  . Throughout her career, she has always held a passion for innovative ART technologies aimed at improving the fertility journey and IVF outcomes. In her current multi-faceted role, Jullin draws upon her experience as a seasoned embryologist and former lab director to navigate partnering clinics through seamless adoption of Future Fertility's AI-powered oocyte quality assessment tools, as well as overseeing Future Fertility's scientific project collaborations.  . With her extensive IVF experience and comprehensive understanding of the laboratory operations, she also provides invaluable input to the company's product development processes.  . Future Fertility was started as a clinical need and soon became a passionate research project and, in 2018, it became the first tool to use artificial intelligence to score egg quality. Future Fertility has created a science-backed solution to empower patients, doctors, and embryologists around the world. . . Join us to listen to this incredible episode where Jullin tells us all about Future Fertility. . To connect with Jullin, you can reach her via Instagram for Future Fertility https://www.instagram.com/futurefertilityai/ . Remember to Subscribe, leave a review and give this podcast a 5*rating to help spread more awareness about In(Fertility).  . . This is a podcast that shares stories of fertility & Infertility in Africa & all across the world. Representation Matters. Our stories matter. Our stories help others feel less alone. . If you would like to share your story, I would love to hear from you. Please email me at: fertilityconversations@gmail.com . Infertility | Pregnancy Loss| Childless Not By Choice | Baby Loss | Miscarriages | Male Factor Infertility | Donor Eggs | Fertility | Birth Control | Donor Sperm | Embryo Adoption | Surrogacy | IUI| IVF | Mental Health | Fertility Preservation |Egg Freezing | Sperm Freezing | PTSD | Sexual Cycles | Period Pains Infertility Podcast | Fertility Podcast I Menstruation |Adhesions | Adenomyosis | Fibroids | PCOS | Endometriosis | Irregular Cycles| Blocked Tubes | Fertility Coach I Fertility related topics | Cervical Incompetency I Transabdominal Cerclage I Vaginal Cerclage I Embryologist I EggBank I GlobalEggDonationAgency I Egg Quality I Recurrent Pregnancy Loss

We're going behind the scenes at the Sanger Institute with Cordelia Langford, Director of Scientific Operations, to find out what it takes to make Big Science happen, and hear the stories behind the sequencing.Full show notes, transcript and references online at GeneticsUnzipped.com Follow us on Twitter @GeneticsUnzipThis episode of Genetics Unzipped was written and presented by Kat Arney with audio production by Emma Werner and Sally Le Page.This podcast is produced by First Create the Media for the Genetics Society - one of the oldest learned societies dedicated to promoting research, training, teaching and public engagement in all areas of genetics.

Introduction:Stephanie Sousa, Senior Vice President of Operations at a Stealth Company, who recently joined Transcend Therapeutics as Senior Vice President of Operations. Stephanie has worked in life sciences her whole career for various well known firms in Greater Boston like Novartis, Agios Pharmaceuticals, Odyssey Therapeutics, and now Transcend. Outline:How and what made you get into the life science industry?Did you know ‘Operations' was what you wanted to do?You spent over 15 years at Novartis as Director of Operations, Global Discovery Chemistry, Director of Scientific Operations, then Global Head of Scientific Operations...tell us about how your roles and responsibilities evolved and what the experience meant for you working for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.What motivated your move over to Agios? How large was the firm at the time you joined then by the time you left?As the VP of Facilities Operations, how was it managing a 200k sf footprint across multiple building at University Park?Agios is not a small company, but what was different in your day to day going from large pharma to a company under 1k employees?Taking us to the present, did the relationships you made earlier in your career present the opportunity to join Odyssey and Transcend?What is keeping you busy today and how exciting is it helping a company grow during its earlier stages?In your experience, what are the most important aspects for an earlier-mid stage company to successfully grow and attract the right talent?How much of the science do you have to understand when building out a lab facility? Is it important having flexible infrastructure to accommodate the potential future therapeutic areas your firm may get into? There must be many, many considerations that go into the strategy of what you need to ensure the team can build their science?Structurally, what does your department team typically look like?Did Covid affect the operational process for a life science company with in-house lab? Do you think anything changed for the long-term and not only the short-term?What excites you most about the journey ahead for you and your team?Produced by Slice of Media, Inc.

Genentech US Medical Affairs is involved in hundreds of concurrent clinical trials that involve a spectrum of participants and investigators. The world of clinical trials and therapy development has been evolving and now COVID-19 is forcing the industry to innovate in different ways as it deals with labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and a new virtual-first patient engagement environment. Nik Kolatkar, Vice President, Scientific Operations, US Medical Affairs at Genentech sat down with Greg Kefer to discuss his vision for reimagining the way trials are executed. In order to meet modern consumer expectations, Genentech is leveraging advanced conversational AI to engage trial participants, to diversify, to democratize, and to create a constant feedback mechanism — all made possible through simple, smart, interactive messaging on smartphones.   Nik also describes the Genentech Innovation Hub strategy and how that team takes a startup mindset predicated on looking horizontally across the organization to achieve small, quick wins and then scaling the technology that works across the entire project portfolio.

Genentech US Medical Affairs is involved in hundreds of concurrent clinical trials that involve a spectrum of participants and investigators. The world of clinical trials and therapy development has been evolving and now COVID-19 is forcing the industry to innovate in different ways as it deals with labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and a new virtual-first patient engagement environment. Nik Kolatkar, Vice President, Scientific Operations, US Medical Affairs at Genentech sat down with Greg Kefer to discuss his vision for reimagining the way trials are executed. In order to meet modern consumer expectations, Genentech is leveraging advanced conversational AI to engage trial participants, to diversify, to democratize, and to create a constant feedback mechanism — all made possible through simple, smart, interactive messaging on smartphones.   Nik also describes the Genentech Innovation Hub strategy and how that team takes a startup mindset predicated on looking horizontally across the organization to achieve small, quick wins and then scaling the technology that works across the entire project portfolio.

The Senior Director of Medical and Scientific Operations at the Alzheimer's Association, Doctor Heather Snyder, joins us to talk exactly that - Alzheimer's Disease.

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview again features Dr. David Baker, Professor of Neuroimmunology at Queen Mary University of London in the U.K. We spoke at the ECTRIMS conference last fall. In part one of our interview he raised the issue of why there has been very poor translation from animal models to clinical trials. Today, Dr. Baker, also known as the ”Mouse Doctor” for his work with animal models, lays out why this situation exists and what to do about it.   Interviewee – David Baker I think there’s many reasons why, and I think we all have our failings. And one can point the finger at the animal models, which a lot of the clinicians do, saying it’s the animal model’s fault, which is possible. But I think also we have to look at humans and how humans use their animal models. And then how humans translate the data from the animal models into the clinic, because I think there’s many failings along the line, and I think that’s one of the reasons for the failing between the two.   I think one of the failings is, in terms of the animal models, that when we do our animal models for these, we’re looking for mechanisms not treatments. And so about 70% of studies give drug before disease is ever induced, which never happens in a human. You know, you go after you’ve had one or two or more attacks before you’re given drugs. We also use the drugs in a way that are never used in a human, so people will do what they call a prophylactic drug where they’ll give it before the disease manifests itself. Or a therapeutic dose, which is probably when the animals are showing their symptoms. But in reality, a human would be getting steroids at that time point. They would never get a DMT. So you’re not comparing, you know, apples with apples. You’re comparing apples with pears, and I think that’s one of the problems.   And I think, you know, if you try and block an immune response from being generated, that’s quite easy compared to stopping an immune response once it’s been generated, because immunity’s about giving life-long protection against infections. And so I think it’s a different type of beast to target. So I think this is where the animal models could do it, because EAE is one of the few where you have this relapsing-remitting disease course. But it’s very, very rare that people actually start to treat in between attacks to block further relapses. I think that’s one of the problems.   The other big problem is the dose; the dose relationship between animals and humans. There’s a tendency we just keep giving more and more and more and more, and eventually the drugs will work. But you’ve got this problem that animals are very liable to be stressed, and we call it the building site effect, so construction site effect. And if you have lots of loud noises, it scares animals. They get very stressed, and your EAE just disappears. And likewise, if you just give lots and lots of drug, that probably tastes nasty. They get stressed out as well. And I think many of the so-called wonder cures – cures of the week – are because we’re just giving too much, which doesn’t have a relationship to what the human dose is going to be.   And then, likewise, I think we’ve got too much of a publication bias for the need to generate positive data. And I think what we then have to do is we have to look at the quality of the data. And I think there has been a lot of failure to replicate data. I think some of that is because some studies lack quality control, and the way I look at that – and I could be wrong; obviously it’s an opinion – but if you look at the way that EAE is scored (it’s normally a scoring system 1 to 3 or 1 to 4) and then you have your drug, which may be, you know, takes your control down from 3 down to a 1. But then, every now again, you look at the studies where it goes either way, and your controls are at 1 and it goes up to 3, and I ask the question how do you get a score of 1? Because if you had four animals, they’re all scoring 1. Or is it three animals score 0 and one score 4, and that will give you a score of 1. And I think if people were made to actually put the data about how many animals got disease, we’d be able to interpret those line graphs. Because I feel that, in many cases, some of those graphs lack quality control.   If you have a robust quality control system, your control group should be giving you roughly the same type of scores every time. But in individual papers you can see, in some groups you have a score of 1 in the control group. The next experiment it’s a score of 3. To my mind I think if you look at that, then those are probably the experiments are much more likely not to replicate. So I think you have to be, obviously, skeptical, but I really would like people to actually probably give us the information about how many animals got disease – what is their mean score – in addition to those line graphs. Because without that, they’re impossible to interpret.   So that’s, you know, kind of one problem of the animals. And then for the humans, you have the same problems. So they over-interpret the animal data. The people doing the clinical trials are very, very rarely the people who came up with the idea. So if there’s a weird side effect that you may know about, you know, that’s not translated to the person who’s actually doing the study, because they don’t talk to the basic scientists. Then they probably underpower the studies. They don’t necessarily pick the right outcome measurements. So I think there’s many failings in both sides of the equation, and it’s not always the animal model. But I think unless we kind of up our game, I think it’s going to be very difficult for the people who are working on animal models, because you know, there are treatments that come along for, you know, the immune part of multiple sclerosis.   And if you’re thinking about the ethical use of animals, it’s much harder to make the ethical argument that you should be using disease models which are very severe for the animals to try and work out fundamental parts of biology. And, therefore, I think we’ll find that you know the funding agencies start to say, well, why are we funding this work? So I think we need to have good quality work, because if we don’t have good quality work, it allows that clinical view that animal work doesn’t really deliver the treatments. And I think they can deliver the treatments, but we just have to use our animal studies wisely to ask questions rather than, you know, blindly saying this will work in multiple sclerosis because it works in EAE. That doesn’t make sense to me.   Interviewer – Dan Keller Do you have any succinct tips for people who are either reviewing papers on animal studies or people who are reading those papers once they’re published or even the general public reading a news story?   Dr. Baker Well my first tip would be probably – and this is okay as an opinion – but, you know, EAE data is nonparametric. It goes 1, 2, 3, 4; it’s not a continuous scale, so first tip is don’t use, you know, the t-test of parametric data on nonparametric data. And that does make a difference. There is a Nature paper published this year that was analyzed with a t-test. If you analyze it with a Mann-Whitney test, which you should have done, the data becomes nonsignificant. So rather than the take home message is, you know, this is a new wonder drug for multiple sclerosis, their answer should have been you have to go back and reproduce your EAE experiment because it didn’t work. So I think that would be the first tip. And then the second tip, I would really like people to say, tell us how many animals get disease and on what level and when, so we can interpret the line graph.   MSDF This is something that you routinely see in oncology done right. They talk about percent of responders, and among responders, what was the shrinkage of the tumor? They don’t average it out among all the people who dilute it out by not responding.   Dr. Baker Well I think one of the problems as well is we’ve also got this publication bias. We’ve got you know this urge to see positive data, and I think that skews the whole system.   MSDF Has anything changed since you came out with a response to the animal checklist?   Dr. Baker I think, sadly, no, but we’re actually doing the checklist again, so we will be able to see if things have changed. I don’t think it has. I think the message hasn’t gotten through. But I think – this is, again, another one of those nails in the animal model coffin that, if we don’t up our game, we’ll be seen to be doing an inferior quality work and eventually we’ll get discarded. So I know that some of the grant councils are, as you know, saying this is a condition of your grant. But I think you know it’s been slow to change, and I think one of the reasons is actually people who are leaders of the field actually are some of the people who are some of the worst offenders. So we’re leading by bad example rather than good example.   MSDF We don’t want to leave the listener with the impression that you’re against animal models. I mean, you’re known as “Dr. Mouse,” so you know I guess you just want to see them done well.   Dr. Baker Yes, I’m passionate. I mean, I really you know believe animal models have a real positive impact to do. And I’ve been really lucky in the recent years is that, you know, some of those animal models – and work we’ve done from animal models – is going through into humans and you know is starting to make the difference. So you know our work with the Cannabis was great. You know, it shows that you know our animal work has validity. Without the animal model stuff we’ll never really understand the biology. You can’t do all the experiments in humans. You do need experimental systems to be able to ask questions. And you need to be able to invent.   And you know there is some fantastic work. You know I’ve picked up the papers, and I get really excited by it, but I think, at the same time, we have to also be a drum to say, you know, try and improve the quality. Because, at the end of the day, it’s more likely that if you’re doing good quality animal experiments, that other people will be able to replicate it. And it will move the field on further and faster. And I think if people believe what we produce as being good solid work, then it’s going to be a win-win situation.   MSDF It would be nice to see sort of a meta-analysis of animal studies that are considered to have been done well versus those not and see which ones translated into advances in the human situation, because so many times they say, well, sure it works in animals, but it doesn’t work in humans. Well if it works in animals because it was set up not so well, then that might be a reason not to work in humans.   Dr. Baker Yes. I think you know the problem of animal models has got nothing peculiar to the multiple sclerosis field. It’s just a common theme. And I think that tells me it’s not a problem of animal models, because if it’s so common in every other discipline, it tells us it’s something how we use the animals is the fundamental problem. Now, you know for MS, we don’t really know. I mean, I think this going to be the – we’re at ECTRIMS now, and I think the whole world can change a little bit today, or in the next few days, because we’ve always thought of MS as being a T cell-mediated disease. Now that may be still the true answer, but now we’re starting to see ocrelizumab, which is a big B cell depleting antibody probably – I’m predicting – to have as good an effect as anything that the T cell you know brigade has ever done. And, in fact, if you look at most of the MS drugs, you would say that most of them actually are inhibiting B cell function.   Now, does that tell us that B cells are driving the disease? It may well do. Or it may well not. Now some people could argue – and they will – you know they’re the reservoir for the virus that causes multiple sclerosis. And then other people will say, well, actually the antigen-presenting cells. And let’s see, but I think what we’ll find is you know EAE will have to have changed its focus. We’ve been focusing our studies on T cell biology, but in fact, the T cell-inhibitory molecules haven’t really delivered. So is that right? And it may well be you know we have to think of a different biology. But EAE can certainly do that if need be.   So we’ll have to you know try and work out how do these B cell-depleting agents work. Is it you know via antigen presentation or not? I don’t know.   MSDF We’ve always thought of T cells as regulating B cells. Now it looks like they both regulate each other.   Dr. Baker I mean, I have my history in skin diseases, and when I first started working, actually my boss was more interested in B-regulatory cells. T-regulatory cells kind of hadn’t really existed at that time point. So I think we’re trying to reinvent the wheel. If we look throughout the literature, it’s a cross-talk between T and B cells are probably the answer. And we’ll see. Again, from our animal studies, we’ve had animal studies where we’ve manipulated the immune system making sure that has a positive effect. We’ve been able to translate that, so we have an N of 1 where we’ve got rid of somebody’s neutralizing beta-interferon antibodies by antigen-specific mechanisms. Now if we could translate that into MS, then we may have a way of treating MS. But we’ll see.   MSDF Very good, thank you. I appreciate it.   Dr. Baker Okay.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This episode is the final one in our series of MS podcasts. We hope that the series has been enlightening and has spurred further discussion about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, potential ways to intervene, and new research directions. We’ve tried to communicate this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, with a goal of opening new routes toward significant clinical advances. Although we won’t be adding any new podcasts, the series will remain available on the MS Discovery website for the foreseeable future.   This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. David Baker, Professor of Neuroimmunology at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. We spoke at the ECTRIMS conference last fall, where I asked him about his work with cannabinoid compounds – work that has led to a better understanding of the cannabinoid system as well as to candidate drug compounds to treat spasticity.   Interviewer – Dan Keller In terms of what you're doing now with cannabinoids, can you tell me what you are looking for, and what you've found?   Interviewee – David Baker Many, many years ago, we actually were probably the first people to show that cannabis can actually alleviate muscle stiffness in animal models of multiple sclerosis, which then kind of underpinned the push to look for cannabis in MS. So people with MS were smoking cannabis and perceiving benefit. The question was, why? And what they didn't really understand that there was going to be an unfolding biology. And a few years later after our first discovery that actually cannabinoids can cause relaxation of the muscles, we understood that the function of the cannabinoid system is to regulate nerve signaling. And so because the cannabinoid system does regulate the strength of synaptic signaling, then it's obvious that it can inhibit signs and symptoms because of this excessive neurostimulation. So at the time of that, then we realized that the receptor is a CB1 receptor, and the compound within cannabis is THC, and they're the same molecules that cause all the side effects. So you could never really disassociate away the high from the medical benefit. So we started to think, well, how can we try and get the medical benefit from the cannabinoid system and at the same time try and limit the side effect potential.   So what we thought is, well, if we can stop the cannabinoid molecules getting in the brain, then they won't cause the side effects. But maybe we can target the aberrant signaling in the spinal cord and the peripheral system to try and get the benefits. And so that was our intention. So we tried to make a CNS-excluded drug. And that's, in fact, what we did. We made a drug that was very, very water soluble, so you know, you use the mechanism of the blood-brain barrier to actually exclude it from the brain. So we made the compound, and a few weeks later, we kind of started putting it into animal models, not really doing it the pharmaceutical way, which would be a methodical testing. So we showed that it didn't cause any of the unwanted side effects that are associated with cannabis in the animals. And then we put it in a system where we had a spasticity in a multiple sclerosis relevant system, and the drug worked.   Now what we did know is that the drug was blocked by the activity of the CB1 receptor antagonist, so it looked like we'd made what we set out to make. So we were really excited. And from that point, we started to try and see if we could develop it as a drug. Unfortunately what we realized very quickly actually is that it doesn't work by the known cannabinoid receptor system, and I think what we stumbled across is a whole new biology of the cannabinoid system.   And so we've been developing this drug bit by bit. We set up a university spinout company to try and develop it as a pharmaceutical drug. And over the years, bit by bit, we've been pushing it forward. So it's very safe in animals. It has a massive therapeutic window. And with grant funding agencies etc. we've managed to be able to take it into phase I study where it passed with flying colors. We tested it in 60 healthy humans. And a few weeks ago, we started our first testing in people with multiple sclerosis. So we'll have to see how it works. But we hope by early in 2016 we'll have the answer. So it could be a symptom modifying drug, but it doesn't have any of the side effects associated with drugs such as, you know, Sativex or baclofen as well. So it's not sedating as far as we know.   The way that the drug works is a new mechanism. And what we can probably say is it serves to block the excitation of nerves. So it dampens down excessive signaling, which are probably the consequences or the causes of spasms and spasticity and possibly the symptoms as well and maybe pain. We just have to do more work to see if it will work that way.   MSDF Is this a hyperexcitable system? Or is it a hypoinhibited system where you're getting this spasticity?   Dr. Baker Well, I think spasticity is largely caused by loss of the inhibitory circuitry. So there's probably less GABAergic signaling. And so one can, you know, drive the inhibitory system, like you do with GABA, but likewise you can actually kind of block the excitation. And this mechanism actually probably only exists in pathology. So this is probably why there isn't the side effect potential that the real target that we're actually after really only occurs when the nervous system is going a bit haywire. So that's why we think we've got good safety margin.   MSDF And you had told me that this does not induce hunger, which I guess is another sign that it's not getting into the CNS?   Dr. Baker Having said all that, it was made not to get in the central nervous system, but in reality, it doesn't matter if it does get in the central nervous system. So in fact, about 15% of the drug does get into the central nervous system, which would be as good as many drugs that are CNS penetrant. I guess when we were starting, we were hoping that, you know, it was going to be excluded because we thought it was a cannabinoid receptor agonist, but in reality, it doesn't matter. And in fact what we know is actually this targeting into the lesions. So there's actually more goes into the area. And what this kind of spins on to some other work that we've done with some of our sodium channel work.   We've been developing new sodium channel blockers as potential neuroprotectants. And what we've done is certain molecules actually get excluded by CNS drug pumps, and what we'd noticed in MS is that some of these drug pumps disappear. So we made a drug that was actually targeted specifically to one of those drug pumps, which would normally mean it would be excluded from the brain, but what we showed is that with these new sodium channel blockers, that actually they physically target into the lesion where the pump disappears. And so again, you increase this therapeutic window between effect versus side effect, because again with the sodium channels, you need them for health. You block them, and you have side effects. But what we've found with the sodium channel blockers is that in the animal models, sodium channel blockers were neuroprotective, and we then took that idea forward actually into the clinical trial.   So we first of all thought the trials with sodium channel blockers had failed. Why had they failed? Well, the reason they failed was the trial outcomes weren't right, and suddenly actually because of this unpleasant side effect, 50% of the people didn't take the drug. So the trial was doomed before it ever started. And then what we had was we had the bloods of the people in the trial. So we looked two years after the trial had finished and was seen to be a failure, and we found that 50% of people weren't taking the drugs. But if you look to the people who were taking the drugs, we could see that there was less neurofilament in their blood indicative that there is less nerve damage. And so actually in reality, the trial actually was positive, but it was seen to be negative because of this failure to take the drug.   So the question was, how could we then develop that forward? So the clinical guy said, well, let's think how we could best do a quick trial. And they came up with the idea of the optic nerve being the ideal target. And so what they said to us was, can you, you know, model this in the animal model? So we developed a new animal model. So we took Vijay Kuchroo's 2D2 mice, which are preprogrammed to get optic neuritis, and then we just made their eyes florescent so we could just look in their eyes and see nerves in real time and in life. And as a consequence of using the transgenic, which targeted myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein, the cells would go in, cause optic neuritis, that would cause nerve death, and then we could monitor the nerve death just by looking into the eye, because each nerve was labeled with a fluorescent protein. We'd see one single nerve die.   And so we started to use that as a way of testing different drugs for neuroprotection. And we put a whole stack of different compounds, minocycline, sodium channel blockers, glutamate receptor antagonist, we did a few. And we got some hits with the sodium channel blockers, and we tried a few of the different ones, some of them better than others. And unfortunately the one that they chose for the trial is probably the worst one in the animals, but they decided that you had to load drug quickly, so they selected phenytoin. So we showed that the sodium channel could work in the optic neuritis, and then the idea was then we translate that and then do a trial with optic neuritis in the human.   So this was a trial that Raj Kapoor did. And so the idea was that people go blind, and then you go to the doctors. And then they were randomized to either get steroids, which is the standard treatment, or they'd get steroids plus a sodium channel blocker, which was phenytoin at the time. And that was done because you can dose very quickly. So the idea was to get people on drug very quickly. So within seven days of their first symptom, people were on active drug. And people were treated for about six months. And then they looked at the retinal fiber thickness. So as a consequence of the ganglion in the retina dying, the retina thins, and then you can measure that with a machine called OCT, optical coherence tomography. And that was slowed. So they saved 30% of the nerves from dying, even though there were people getting a steroid. So it tells us that really certain channel blockers are neuroprotective.   And then the question is, is how then can we show that in reality? So what we've done from there is we've actually gone on with another sodium channel blocker, which was called oxcarbazepine, which was much more effective in the animal models. And we've been trying to initiate a new trial design whereby we're looking for people who are on current DMTs by showing evidence of neurofilament release, which is indicative that their nerves are being destroyed, because as the nerves are destroyed, they liberate their contents, and then we can pick that up in the biological fluids. So the idea is that if they've got neurofilaments in their cerebrospinal fluid, they get the option of having a sodium channel blocker in addition to their DMT. And then we'll monitor them by serial lumbar punctures to see if the neurofilament levels decrease as a way of a trench push on the trial design for phase II.   Because if you're thinking about the standard phase III, phase II trial for neuroprotection, you're talking about a two- or three-year trial, which will take you two years to recruit the 600 people and another year to do the analysis. So you're really talking about a seven-year trial with 600 people. This trial design will kind of push it down probably to 12 months to 18 months with 60 people. So we can do 10 times more people and a lot quicker this way. So that's started where we've been recruiting, and we're still recruiting, but fingers crossed that would be another way forward in terms of developing neuroprotection. I think it shows how we've been trying to use our animal models to translate things into the human. Because at the end of the day, there has been really, really poor translation between the animal models and humans. And I guess the question is, is why?   MSDF We’ll pick up on that question in part two of our interview with Dr. Baker next time, when he’ll describe some of the deficiencies he sees in the design and interpretation of animal experiments and how they could be improved to better relate to clinical trials and the clinical situation.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Drs. Bibiana Bielekova, who is an investigator at the National Institutes of Health, and Mika Komori, a postdoctoral fellow in her lab. We caught up with the two physician-researchers at the ACTRIMS meeting in New Orleans earlier this year. At the meeting, Dr. Komori talked about a new and more sensitive way to evaluate what may be happening in the brains and spinal cords of people with progressive MS.   In a recent study, she examined samples of cerebral spinal fluid, or CSF, collected through a thin needle near the base of the spine. She was scouting for immunological biomarkers of progressive MS. In the analysis, a molecule called CD27, mostly from T cells, stood out, as did another marker specific to B cells. Even more revealing was the ratio of the CD27 molecule to the T cells. T cells are a big player in relapsing MS and not usually associated with the progressive, more neurodegenerative forms of MS. The unexpected results raise new questions about why immune-modulating drugs do not seem to be effective against progressive MS.   If validated, the new test may lead to better diagnosis and treatment of people with MS and other neurological disorders. And it may speed up clinical trials in progressive MS and reduce their cost. In fact, the same research team used their new biomarker test in a small phase 2 study of the anti-B cell drug, rituximab, delivered both intravenously in the blood and intrathecally in the spinal column. Unfortunately, the new biomarker test showed that the double delivery system did not work as expected to eliminate inflammatory B cells trapped in the brains of people with progressive MS. They stopped the study early for lack of efficacy.   In a change to our usual podcast format, Dr. Bielekova interviewed Dr. Komori about the specifics of the study and put the results in a larger context. Midway through the interview, Carol Morton, a past editor of MS Discovery Forum, asked both doctor-scientists about what the new test means for treating patients.   Interviewer – Dr. Bibiana Bielekova As a physician, when we see patients, we don’t really know what’s happening in their brains, right? We are using some tools that are supposed to help us to identify like, for example, MRI, but they are not perfect. So, how did you choose to address that problem?   Interviewee – Dr. Mika Komori So, when I saw patients, I can’t tell them that the drug, which are now available, is effective or not, especially for progressive MS patients, because currently so far all big clinical trials, they didn’t show any effects on them. Because of that result, we think progressive MS patients don’t have any intrathecal inflammation. So far we believe MS – multiple sclerosis – is inflammatory disease, but we don’t know if it’s true for progressive MS or not.   Dr. Bielekova Yes, and, in fact, it is because these tools are not that ideal, right? So, in fact, by using the tools that are available, such as MRI or these cerebrospinal fluid markers that have been developed more than 40 years ago, the conclusion is that there isn’t inflammation in progressive MS, right, because all of them are basically decreased, with exception of IgG index which, as you said, remains stable for many, many years. So somebody who had, for example, infection during childhood can have elevated IgG index for the rest of their life.   So that was really the reason why we wanted to develop something that is more sensitive. And also, I think, the question really was, does cerebrospinal fluid reflect what’s happening in the brain tissue? And can we somehow develop technology that can tell us what is happening in the brain tissue without taking, of course, the biopsy, which is extremely invasive, and we cannot really use it in people, right? So how did you address that problem?   Dr. Komori We developed a very good way to measure soluble biomarkers in the CSF with a new technique called Meso Scale Discovery.   Dr. Bielekova So I think we should probably step back a little bit and say that our goal was to really look at the biomarkers that can point towards a specific cell, right? Because there are proteins that can be released by all immune cells, such as for example, chemokines, and, in fact, the vast majority of cytokines. But we were especially interested in looking at the proteins than can specifically point to one particular cell type, and so you did something else to really measure that, right? In fact, we all helped you to do that because it was so difficult, right? So we employed the whole lab to do the separation of cells. And then you were looking at which cells are producing these biomarkers.   Dr. Komori Right.   Dr. Bielekova So tell us about those three that really panned out as the best.   Dr. Komori When we see the results of soluble CD27, soluble CD14, and soluble CD21, soluble CD27 correctly identified all inflammatory neurological disease and also only negative for noninflammatory neurological disease patients.   Dr. Bielekova Whereas all of the traditional markers together, if we put all of them together, they could identify only about two-thirds of the patients. We were really surprised, because – I mean, the field believed, as Mika had said, right, based on the fact you no longer have contrast-enhancing lesions; the treatments no longer work; you don’t have clear cytosis, meaning a large number of white blood cells in the cerebrospinal fluid – the field and us, we believed that what we are going to see, once Mika unblinds these two cohorts of close to 200 patients each that we will see that progressive patients have significantly lower amount of inflammation. But that’s not what she saw. She saw something completely different and surprising. So what did you see?   Dr. Komori Well we saw almost comparable level of intrathecal inflammation in both PPMS/SPMS to RRMS.   Dr. Bielekova Not almost, right? There wasn’t any statistically significant difference.   Dr. Komori No.   Dr. Bielekova So on the group level, we saw the same level.   Dr. Komori Absolutely. Yes, and it was so significant compared to a healthy donor and noninflammatory neurological diseases. So all healthy donor and neuro-inflammatory neurological diseases, they didn’t have high level of especially soluble CD27. But almost 90% of each MS subtypes had very high soluble CD27.   Dr. Bielekova But when you did the ratios…   Dr. Komori Then we did the ratio and calculated soluble CD27 per T cell in CSF. We found that even higher level of ratio results in progressive MS patients, both in primary progressive and secondary progressive. And for our MS patients the ratio is almost comparable to healthy donor and noninflammatory neurological diseases. That means, although we don’t see many immune cells in the CSF for progressive MS patients, those cells are in the CNS tissue. And it cannot move, but just shedding the soluble markers like soluble CD27 into the CSF. And we can detect that marker when we measure the CSF.   Dr. Bielekova And I think it really nicely ties with the beautiful pathology studies that have been published that demonstrate that patients with progressive MS no longer have this very dense inflammation around the vessel, which is the type inflammation that is capable of opening blood-brain barrier, right? Which means that that’s the type of inflammation that is associated with contrast-enhancing lesions. But instead, when pathologists looked at normal-appearing white matter, they could see, you know, one T cell here, one T cell there, right? It’s really difficult to quantify it on the pathology level, because they never assay the whole brain. But your assay is, in fact, looking at the entire brain. And what your assay is saying is that the number of cells is basically the same in all of these different stages of MS disease process. What is really different is where they are located, right?   So, in relapsing/remitting MS, they are located in the perivascular aggregates, not much in the normal appearing white matter. That’s where they open the blood-brain barrier. But in the progressive MS they are located in the brain. And I think our conclusion was that, in fact, this may be the major reason why current treatments are not working for progressive MS, because basically we would expect that only those drugs can work in progressive MS that have very good penetrance into the brain tissue.   Now, I think that we also have to realize that just the presence of the cells in the tissue doesn’t tell us that they are pathogenic, right? So it may be that they are there, but something else is driving disability. But on the other hand, the data we have, for example, from recently announced ocrelizumab trial is really suggesting that these cells are indeed pathogenic, right? So I think that we can say that progressive MS is neurodegenerative disease only if we can eliminate inflammation from the brain of progressive MS patients, and it does not translate into stopping disability or significantly inhibiting disability.   But the data that we have published, and we are still collecting, are really suggesting that current treatments, in fact, do not eliminate cells from the brain of progressive MS patients, right? So I think the question of compartmentalized inflammation versus neurodegeneration in progressive MS is really open. And I mean my view is that probably both of them are going to be important, right? I think that just because there are immune cells in the CNS tissue, it doesn’t necessarily mean that neurodegeneration is also not present. But I think the hypothesis that progressive MS is no longer inflammatory disease, and it’s pure neurodegenerative disease – I think that hypothesis is, at the moment, not confirmed, right, because we don’t have the experiment where we would eliminate the inflammation.   MSDF So both of you are physicians. Does this influence how you would treat people with progressive MS at all?   Dr. Komori Yes, absolutely. So from now, when I see high ratio results of progressive MS patients – soluble CD27 per T cell – if they have high ratio, then I will not treat them with current immunomodulatory drugs. But may be a good idea to try more effective drugs to penetrate in the brain. But if the progressive MS patients, although they have high soluble CD27 but low ratio results, then it will be worthwhile to use some immunomodulatory drugs for them.   Dr. Bielekova I would even kind of take a step back and say that in order to be able to use your tool for the treatment decision, I think we need to gain another type of knowledge which we don’t have yet and that is what are current treatments really doing on these type of assays and this type of pathology, right? So we really need to quantify each individual drug, how much it can affect intrathecal inflammation in patients with the open blood-brain barrier, where the drug actually can get into the tissue versus patients with closed blood-brain barrier, where potentially the penetrance is much, much, much more limited, right. I think that it brings back that case that I mentioned where, you know, we are using, for example, cyclophosphamide, and we are assuming that just because the drug is inhibiting immune response in the blood, it will inhibit immune response in the cerebrospinal fluid. And I think that those assumptions are just not tested, right? And, in fact, when we tested them, we realized that the effect on the intrathecal inflammation is extremely limited.   So I think that there is a knowledge that we need to gain, which is this knowledge of which MS drug is doing what. And, if we conclude that they are not doing a sufficient job, which I am afraid that’s going to be the conclusion, then we can use this technology to in fact develop new drugs, right? Because your technology is looking at the type of inflammation that cannot be measured by contrast-enhancing lesions. In fact cannot be measured by anything that we have available thus far, right? So how are we going to even try to develop new drugs for progressive MS?   Well, we can do it by doing large, Phase 3 trials like we have been doing thus far and looking at disability. But of course, that’s incredibly expensive, and it’s just very inefficient way to do it. So instead, doing small trials where you take patients because they have intrathecal inflammation, right. So you now measure; (A) how much inflammation; and (B) its compartmentalized inflammation. Then you can give them the drug, and then you say, ‘okay so now I’m going to measure’ – and you can do it in 3 months or 6 months, in much, much, much shorter time periods – and say, you know, ‘how much is this drug inhibiting intrathecal inflammation?’ And, in fact, that’s precisely what you have done in our RIVITALISE trial, right? Which, unfortunately, we stopped precisely because your assays determined that we are not achieving as much inhibition of inflammation as we were hoping to achieve. So I think that that makes drug development very efficient. And hopefully it will allow us as a society, to screen many, many more treatments on a yearly basis than what we can do currently.   Dr. Komori I think if we can measure the cell-specific or pathophysiology-specific biomarkers, we can combine treatments.   Dr. Bielekova Absolutely.   Dr. Komori If, like interferon, it doesn’t work, let’s try natalizumab. If not, let’s try this, but if we know that interferon works for this side of the pathophysiology, but natalizumab works for this side of the pathophysiology, then we can combine them to more effective treatment.   Dr. Bielekova Yes, and I think that I would say ‘more to come,’ right? So far Mika published data that relate to inflammation, but the lab is working very hard on biomarkers that reflect, for example, mitochondrial dysfunction, or neurodegenerative processes. And we absolutely believe that treatments will have to be combined, and that this, you know, basically assaying cerebrospinal fluid is going to be that tool that will, on one hand allow us to develop these new treatments, and on the other hand, allow us to treat patients smartly at the bedside.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety-six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Michael Levy, associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University. When we met in his office, he told me about his work on the role of T cells in neuromyelitis optica, or NMO. Finding antibodies to aquaporin-4 is indicative of NMO. But when Dr. Levy used aquaporin-4 reactive T cells, they could induce NMO in a mouse model, giving a clue to the role of T cells in the disease, and possibly opening up a new therapeutic avenue.   Interviewer – Dan Keller What's different about this approach than what has been thought of previously?   Interviewee – Michael Levy In neuromyelitis optica, there is the thought that the disease involves an antibody, the anti-aquaporin-4 antibody, that that antibody is involved in causing the disease. And what we demonstrated in this model is that we could recreate the disease simply by developing T cells against aquaporin-4. It's the exact same target as the antibody, but instead of using the antibody to exacerbate disease, we use T cells. And it works really well and causes optic neuritis and transverse myelitis, just like in the patient.   MSDF Can you briefly describe your method?   Dr. Levy We raised T cells in mice that don't have aquaporin-4. These mice see aquaporin-4 as a foreign antigen and mount an aggressive immune response against them, and we harvest those T cells from that animal. And what we do is we polarize them. We basically turn them into more aggressive types of immune cells in a dish. And then we transfer those T cells to a naïve mouse that does contain aquaporin-4. And those T cells attack the aquaporin-4, and it does so only in the optic nerves and the spinal cord and also a little bit in the brain.   MSDF But aquaporin-4 is distributed more widely than that in the body.   Dr. Levy That's correct. Actually, there's a higher level of aquaporin-4 in the lung, stomach, kidneys, muscle. Many tissues contain aquaporin-4, but the T cells decide which aquaporin-4 to attack. They are a thoughtful type of cell, and for whatever reason, and this is true in the human, too, the T cells only decide to go for those specific tissues.   MSDF How does a mouse with aquaporin-4 get to an age where you can actually get these T cells out of it? What's the use of aquaporin-4 if they really can survive without it?   Dr. Levy It's amazing that these knockout mice, they don't have any aquaporin-4, are completely viable. There are some abnormalities in function under certain stressful conditions, like stroke or brain trauma, but for the most part, they live normal lives. They must have a good compensatory mechanism that they don't need aquaporin-4, and that's fortunate for us because we can create these animal models.   MSDF When you transferred these T cells to wild-type mice, what did you see?   Dr. Levy Eight days after the transfer, the first thing we noticed is that the mice started blinking and the eyes became sunken into the head, and that's a sign of severe optic neuritis. And then two days later, they had a dragging tail. And a day after that, their hind limbs were paralyzed, and that indicated transverse myelitis.   MSDF What's the role of the antibody if you can induce the disease with the T cell? And does the antibody in itself without T cells have an effect?   Dr. Levy We looked at that, and what we found is that the antibody by itself has absolutely no effect. But in the context of a T cell attack, it can exacerbate the disease, and it does lend specificity to the pathology when you look at it under a microscope. If you add the antibody, there is more aquaporin-4 damage, and it recruits compliment, which causes that damage. So that's really the role of the antibody.   MSDF Can you induce the antibody without T cells? Essentially is aquaporin-4 a T-dependent antigen?   Dr. Levy We think it is, and that's based on the type of antibody it is. The antibody in a human is what's called an IgG1 subtype, which is a T cell-dependent subtype. And that bears out in the animal models as well.   MSDF So the antibody is really an enhancer in the disease as opposed to an initiator?   Dr. Levy That's our thinking. It's not just an enhancer, but also a biomarker of the disease. And maybe in some patients, the antibody is not as harmful, but more of just a biomarker.   MSDF What's the significance of these findings, especially as it relates to human conditions?   Dr. Levy We're always looking for a new target to treat NMO patients, and there were some who were thinking that we should be targeting the antibody to try to either remove it or soak it up somehow. And maybe our model suggests that we should be targeting the T cells. And if there were ways that we could retrain or reeducate those T cells not to attack aquaporin-4 and create a really specific therapy, then we could avoid these broader immunosuppressive therapies that are necessary now to treat these patients.   MSDF Since you have a defined antigen in this case, and I assume you can make some of it, do you have any hope of being able to induce high-zone tolerance using it?   Dr. Levy That is our goal, and we've partnered with a company now to try to create a vaccine therapy using that antigen target. Again, in the same way that a T cell is turned pathogenic with this antigen, we can then retrain that T cell to be tolerized to it. And so we're hoping to apply that sort of technology to humans.   MSDF Now you're coming in at a late stage of the disease. I mean, someone has to present with the disease for you to want to treat it. So really, you can't prevent it. This would be a therapeutic vaccine, not a preventative vaccine?   Dr. Levy Correct. A vaccine therapy more along the lines of retraining than preventing and preparing. Correct.   MSDF Now this applies to NMO, but what about applying it to MS? With NMO, you've got a defined antigen.   Dr. Levy That's exactly right. And with NMO, there isn't what we call antigen spreading, which is where the immune system decides instead of targeting that one antigen, it's going to spread. The epitope is going to spread to other areas of myelin and maybe other components of the central nervous system. With NMO, the antigen is really focused on aquaporin-4, and so that's our advantage. And in MS, there are a lot more targets, and it's probably more of a heterogeneous disease. It would be harder to develop a vaccine therapy for MS.   MSDF Where do you go from here? What's next?   Dr. Levy Next is demonstrating that the mouse model responds to a vaccine therapy approach. We'd like to show that the T cells can be stopped, even when they're pathogenically targeting the aquaporin-4. Transferred into a mouse, we need to demonstrate that a vaccine therapy can prevent their attacks.   MSDF Have you looked or demonstrated T cell receptors specifically for aquaporin-4 fragments?   Dr. Levy We're looking at that now. We're looking in human subjects. We isolate their T cells, and we're looking for a response to certain epitopes of aquaporin-4. That has been done by other groups, but we're looking for specifically pathogenic epitopes now.   MSDF Is there any thought towards some sort of suicide experiment where these T cells that have become activated could then be killed because they're proliferating?   Dr. Levy There is a company in Houston called Opexa Therapeutics. They're doing something similar to that. They're picking out patients' T cells that are reactive against aquaporin-4 and inducing apoptosis so that when these T cells are reintroduced to the body, there is a tolerization. So it is kind of the same thing that you're suggesting. And they are hoping to launch a trial like this by next year.   MSDF Is there anything we've missed or important to add?   Dr. Levy What I'd like to emphasize again is that by focusing on the T cells, we can really hone in on the very upstream early event and really specifically treat…I don't want to use the C word to say cure, but it's really focusing on the source of the problem, rather than treating all the downstream consequences, which is what we do now. So I think our approach has that specific advantage.   MSDF An advantage over a more global nonspecific immunosuppression?   Dr. Levy Exactly, which is what we're doing now.   MSDF Very good. Thanks.   Dr. Levy Thank you.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety-five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music]   Host — Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Lilyana Amezcua, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Part of her work focuses on defining racial disparities in MS, particularly among the Hispanic community. When we met, she said the prevalence of MS among Hispanics in Latin America has been increasing over the past 20 years, and their clinical characteristics are different from those of whites. As Hispanic Americans constitute one of the largest minorities in the U.S. population, she looked into their clinical picture, as well.   Interviewee – Lilyana Amezcua And so we initially did a first observation in 2011 noting when we examined close to 200 MS patients of Hispanic background self-identified that they were at twice the risk of presenting with optic neuritis and spinal cord problems compared to whites. There is some literature indicating throughout Latin America that these observations could be related to an Asian background. And so when we think about a Hispanic, we think about an umbrella that is related to an intermixing of European, African, and Asian derived background or Native American. So that diversity along with the cultural diversity could have some implications in the way that MS behaves and including risk. And that is one of the theories going around that that's why they don't get MS that much because of an Asian background. However, again, like I mentioned, in the last 20 years more cases have been reported.   Interviewer – Dan Keller Haven't Asians been reported to have this opticospinal sort of MS? So would that feed into this optic neuritis finding with the Hispanics?   Dr. Amezcua That is correct, and actually a second study of ours that we did several years ago was to actually specifically look for that definition of opticospinal MS. And so what we found within 200 or so patients was that indeed when we applied that definition, very few met that criteria. But irrespective of that, and we made sure that every case was negative for aquaporin 4, which is an antibody that you commonly find in more of the NMO spectrum disorders, that these individuals did not have this aquaporin 4, but yet close to 20% looked like they had spinal cord lesions that could be associated with opticospinal.   So that observation, of course, led us to think, well, okay, we should look further. If we do think that Asian ancestry could be important, would some of those clinical characteristics be associated with that type of global ancestry? And in fact today we have a poster related to taking the population that we just presented and looking at their genetic variants, which are mostly noting that the European genetic variants are also found in the Hispanic, but now going forward and looking at, well, what about global ancestry and their clinical characteristics? And in that poster, that abstract, we find that the higher proportion of Asian background you have, the higher risk of presenting with let's say, an optic neuritis. Now that doesn't necessarily say that this is just specific for optic neuritis, but it could going forward let us know about the mechanism behind optic neuritis, which is also found in MS, also found in NMO, and these optical spinal forms of MS.   MSDF How did you go about looking at the genetics of the population?   Dr. Amezcua Going about the genetics actually went back to the fact that when I would say, I'm studying Hispanics, people would ask, what is a Hispanic? And it is true…Hispanic…and so it is defined, you know, when you define it it's well, you can be from Cuba, you can be from Mexico, you can be from the US. But really what links us is…and I say linked us because I'm one of them…is the fact that there is a genetic background that is shared. And there's also cultural aspects that are shared. The cultural aspect is probably going to be important when we start examining the environmental aspects of MS.   MSDF What did you find?   Dr. Amezcua We just started basically with vitamin D. We looked at vitamin D levels in Hispanics with MS compared to whites with MS, and we found that significantly lower levels were among the Hispanics. This is not surprising. This is expected, actually, because of the skin coloration and sun exposure probably differences, but it's also widely known that Hispanics would have lower vitamin D levels. Of course, that doesn't answer, well, if they have lower vitamin D levels, if their risk of MS is less, it doesn't give us any explanation. But we know that their vitamin D levels are low.   Other aspects that we have looked at is just examining differences by migration. So we know in MS that migration, usually, depending on when you move from one place to the other and looking at the risk of MS in the underlying country, that will be modified depending on the age of migration. And so of course Hispanics in the US, again, along with their diversity, they're diverse in the fact that there are many that are US born and there are many that are immigrants. So we looked at differences by this, and we found tremendous amount of differences. One was that the US born appears to have an increased risk of developing MS at a younger age. And this again is just validating some of that information that we know about MS in the past, right, coming from a lower prevalent region and being born in a place of higher risk.   But the second was that, which we were surprised, was that the immigrant, despite being here, let's say 25 years, they developed MS after they had emigrated from their country, on average, 15 years later. So that's interesting. That's again calling for us to investigate, what environmental encounters might have they had when coming to this country? And the third was that respective of this, of, you know, disease duration, there was an independent risk factor for the immigrant to develop ambulatory disability at a shorter time. So that's telling us that, again, well, one is differential environmental exposures. But could the immigrant and the US-born also just be two different populations in terms of, again, what does Hispanic mean? That's where we are.   MSDF In that sense, could you correlate vitamin D levels or anything else with the amount of European background or indigenous Central and South American background they had?   Dr. Amezcua I think that's an excellent idea. You know, I think that could be done, to look at the US-born versus the immigrant. Now there is a large study conducted by Dr. Langer-Gould that's examining the risk of MS within Hispanics, whites, and African Americans in relationship to vitamin D and their HLA. So that will give us information on vitamin D. But absolutely we know that within Hispanics, we're going to have to separate groups because it's just such a big umbrella.   MSDF It's also a big umbrella in terms of cultural background. It's not uniform culture whether you're from the Caribbean or Mexico or born in the US.   Dr. Amezcua Absolutely. So culturally we're going to have to tease that out. And it's simply starts by learning about, well, what are those cultural differences? Which could be from simple perceptions and their access and utilization of care, which needs to be first addressed, or to go forward and then say, well, let's see if there's biological differences. First, I think, you know, between the US-born and the immigrant, the differences could be explained also by sociocultural factors. And those need to be teased out. And then from there look to see, well, is this really a health disparity? Or is it an inherent biological difference of the disease, which we also expect to find.   MSDF Do you think that the results you find in this population is going to be more generalizable or relatable and give you some clues into what's going on with anyone who is getting MS or not?   Dr. Amezcua Absolutely. That is the goal. While that diversity is complex, it's also a positive aspect because it will allow you to tease out a lot of those factors. And so within the admixture, of the genetic admixture, one can say, well, you have less European background. But what about that Asian component that is not found in your general European? It doesn't mean that it's not going to be found. Instead of looking for, I guess, a needle in a haystack, you will just be looking it in a block and maybe find something new or lead us to understanding of mechanisms, again, from the optic neuritis and the global ancestry. We are hoping that this is beyond just understanding one population, but understanding MS, which is the target population.   MSDF Have we missed anything important?   Dr. Amezcua There is definitely a lot to do, and I think it's an effort that cannot be done alone. And so combining it with different centers that have the same interests and population is what the goal is, is to create a network of centers that are interested in defining this population, to move faster.   MSDF Great. Thank you.   Dr. Amezcua Great. Thank you.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-four of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Oscar Fernandez, a senior investigator at the Málaga Regional University Hospital in Málaga, Spain. When we met at a neurology conference in Chile, he reviewed for me some of the elements of risk stratification for second-line therapies for MS. That implies there are first-line therapies and probably third-line ones, as well – terms that Dr. Fernandez is not particularly fond of.   Interviewee – Oscar Fernandez I am very much against that classification, but this is being used for clinicians, so I have to accept that. I believe that there is one drug for one patient, and I don't believe in lines. Because if you use lines, then you must be forced sometimes to do the passing through all these lines. And many times you must go indirectly from the very beginning to second or third line and the case is very severe. Anyhow, lines have been defined more or less just taking into account the benefit and the risk. And first line are those drug who are not terrible beneficial; they have more this efficacy, but they are very safe in the long term. This is the first line, and those are interferons, there are like four interferons so far, and glatiramer acetate, this is first line. And second line are those drug where are more efficacious but more risky also. So there you have natalizumab, fingolimod, alemtuzumab, and mitoxantrone.   And even you can go further for the third line, which is maybe bone marrow transplantation and some experimental therapies by now. There are many new drugs coming, and then we must try to classify these as first, second, or third lines. It's very difficult for clinicians today to image, for instance, ocrelizumab, which drug is that? Is it first, second, or third line? Is it very efficacious, is it very safe until now? So why it should be classified as second line? Probably the agencies will say this is for active relapsing or for active MS and just let the clinicians to use it properly.   Interviewer – Dan Keller So what goes into the risk stratification? What parameters do you consider?   Dr. Fernandez Yeah, the first thing is that most clinicians use a balance, for the balance of efficacy and safety. But then they put numbers. You must put numbers. I mean the numbers are there. I mean for low-risk drugs and for very mild diseases the number is 1 in 10,000. You can have severe adverse events 1 in 10,000. For moderate disease and moderate risk, a drug is 1 in 1,000; and for severe, this is risky drugs, is 1 in 100. Those are the numbers to put in the balance. And we know the numbers from the drugs, and we must tailor our decision based on that.   MSDF Are the risks you're looking at purely progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, PML, or are there other risks you're considering in those numbers?   Dr. Fernandez No, PML is just something that appear, but there are many other things to be taken into account. I mean all severe adverse events should be taken into account, and these are the numbers I have mentioned. MS is a very severe disease; it's a risky disease. So we can theorize independent of the severity of the disease and we must look for everything. I mean hematological alteration, hepatic alterations, opportunistic infections, and everything that can be produced by these drugs over these therapies.   MSDF Is it only the drug or do you also take into consideration patient characteristics besides their MS; age, comorbidities, gender, lots of things?   Dr. Fernandez Everything has to be put in the box; I mean all the things have to be consider. And it's not the same to use a drug in a patient which is also a hypothyroid, is diabetic or whatever. So comorbidity, age, sex, and everything has to be taken into account, particularly sex because many drugs can affect pregnancy issues. For instance, so we must take it all together and try to get the right decision.   MSDF Is it a collaborative effort taking into account what the patient preference is either for disease risk, therapeutic risk, or other factors?   Dr. Fernandez Yeah, I think there is to try to find out which is the best way. We know we has collaborate on that and there are a lot of people collaborating. For instance, in Spain, we have a network of MS, and we are doing tremendous advance publishing in this direction. And in Europe and in the world, I believe there is always networks trying to answer all of these questions. For instance, the latest one has been published more recently about the use of L-selectin to stratify the risk for PML in natalizumab users. And this has been very important collaborative study that has validated this measurement, L-selectin, as a factor to be taken into account to reduce the risk of natalizumab.   MSDF Is this something new looking at biomarkers for risk?   Dr. Fernandez Yeah, it's something new. It's still not implemented in most center. But we have been using that for the last two or three years. I have treated more than 250 and especially with natalizumab without a single PML case. Because we use everything at hand to try to reduce the risk of this severe complication.   MSDF How long have those patients been on therapy, natalizumab?   Dr. Fernandez Well, the longest one is 12 years already because this patient participated in clinical trials but they are still there. But all of them more than one year. And the majority of them more even than two years. But as soon as the risk gets over the figure that shouldn’t be got, these patients are withdrawn from the drug. And we have medical simulators now to use on different drugs. Although if you are able to keep the patients on this drug, the patients are perfectly well.   MSDF Do you think the field is going to move more towards that than just looking at JC virus, which is very prevalent anyway?   Dr. Fernandez No, I don't think we should necessarily look for JC virus in every patient. We must look for other things like, for instance, the cases of PML that appear with dimethyl fumarate. I mean there are two cases, as far as I know, but we must look for lymphocytes. I mean doctors always took care of toxicity degrees one, two, three, and four, and we know what to do with these toxicity degrees. And this has not been well done probably in the last years for some clinicians, so we are assisting to some complications because we don't follow the rules strictly. We must follow the rules. Lymphopenia shouldn't be maintained for long periods. Because lymphopenia can be associated with infections, can be associated with tumors. So we better control for these factors. So let's look everything.   MSDF Do databases like MSBase add to the knowledge or information?   Dr. Fernandez Yes, databases probably are fundamental. I mean there are many databases already around the world, and the possibility to share data and to have immediately data from many, many patients is helping us to tailor decisions.   MSDF Have we missed anything important, or is there anything interesting to add?   Dr. Fernandez Yes, I think still there is a tremendous variability between neurologists. And there must be some kind of educational effort in the next future to try to reduce variability. Because by now, there are many drugs; we have confusion. Neurologists treat patients very differently in different countries, even into the same country, into the same hospital. So we must still make a tremendous effort maybe through databases or through evidence-based medicine and try to reduce the variability of what we are doing for our patients.   MSDF Excellent. I appreciate it. Thank you.   Dr. Fernandez Okay, thanks to you.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety-four of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.  

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features a conversation with Dr. Shiv Saidha, an associate professor of neurology in the Division of Neuroimmunology and Neuro-infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. His work has focused on the retina in MS, using the technique of optical coherence tomography, or OCT, to follow the disease, assess and monitor therapeutic strategies, and to better understand the pathobiology of MS. I asked him why the retina is of interest in MS and about the utility of OCT.   Interviewee – Shiv Saidha OCT is the optical analogue of ultrasound B mode imaging. And it's a noninvasive technique that has a lot of utility in quantifying the ultrastructure of various tissues, including the retina. We have a lot of interest in being able to quantify retinal structures specifically in multiple sclerosis because optic nerve pathology, which basically refers to affliction of the optic nerve as part of the MS disease process, is virtually ubiquitous. At the time of postmortem examination of MS patients, 94 to 99% of MS patients are found to have demyelinating plaques within their optic nerves.   So the premise is that demyelination within the optic nerve results in retrograde degeneration of the constituent fibers or axons within the optic nerve. And since those axons or fibers are derived from the retinal nerve fiber layer, which is the innermost layer of the retina, this layer is felt to thin out as part of the MS disease process. Additionally, the neurons – referred to as ganglion cell neurons located in the ganglion cell layer immediately below the retinal nerve fiber layer from which retinal nerve fiber layer axons are derived – are also thought to drop out as part of the MS disease process.   We traditionally conceptualize optic nerve pathology in MS as being an acute phenomenon, namely acute optic neuritis, which does occur in up to, you know, 20 to 70% of MS patients; and in 20 to 25% of cases of MS is the initial hallmark clinical manifestation of the disease process. But beyond acute optic neuritis, there is subclinical optic nerve pathology, which we refer to as subclinical optic neuropathy ongoing within the optic nerves of MS patients.   And so, if we had a technique or an ability to accurately quantify the effects of optic nerve pathology or optic neuropathy – in other words, if we had a way to quantify retinal nerve fiber layer thickness and thickness of ganglion cell…the layer within which ganglion cell neurons are located in the retina – that would provide a substrate or insight into the state or integrity of the optic nerve. And so, optical coherence tomography is a technique which allows us to do this. It allows us to measure thickness of the retinal nerve fiber layer not just around the optic disk which we refer to as the peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer but also in the macular region.   And with the advent of novel segmentation techniques in OCT – many of which are now commercially available – we now are also afforded the capability of quantifying thickness of other discrete retinal layers such as the combined thickness of the ganglion cell layer and inner plexiform layer, which many of us refer to as GCIP or some also refer to it as GCIPL. Conventionally, peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer thickness – at least in cross-sectional studies – was found to be associated with high and low contrast visual function, as might be expected since the retina subserves vision as a function.   But interestingly, early studies even found that thickness of the peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer was associated with disability scores as determined by Expanded Disability Status Scale scores or EDSS scores in MS patients, as well as whole brain volume in MS patients, implying that these metrics derived from OCT somehow provide a window or insight into the global MS disease process. With time, we started to realize that the GCIP thickness might actually be an even more powerful measure of the state of integrity of the optic nerve.   GCIP thickness seems to be more reproducible than that of the retinal nerve fiber layer. It has a intraclass correlation coefficient of about 0.99 with a very tight confidence interval. It has superior structure function correlations with EDSS scores, brain volumes, as well as high and low contrast visual function, as compared to retinal nerve fiber layer thickness. This is really a very interesting and important point about, you know, the potential utility of OCT. Because with this thickness of the GCIP, what we were really getting is a very good estimate of neuronal integrity.   And, one of the factors that has been limited in terms of MRI – or magnetic resonance imaging – is the ability to really accurately and reproducibly quantify collections of axons and neurons. Now in terms of MRI, we often think that the white matter is a very good reflection of axonal integrity, and that gray matter is a good reflection of neuronal integrity. This is not necessarily the case, however. In terms of the white matter, quite a lot of inflammation obviously occurs within the white matter in MS brains. And when that inflammation occurs, white matter volume increases. And then, as that inflammation subsides, the white matter volume drops.   And then, as the next wave of inflammation comes in, again, there's swelling and the white matter volume goes up. And as it resolves, the white matter volume comes down. And so there's this waxing and waning in terms of white matter volume which limits the utility of white matter volume. And in fact, it's for that particular reason that many researchers have found that when you track MS patients over time that the bulk of change is actually seen within the gray matter.   In terms of the gray matter, there is a lot of axons present within the gray matter. And so, gray matter volume is not just a pure measure of neuronal integrity. And the other thing is that the axons within the gray matter are predominantly myelinated similar to within the white matter. And so these brain substructure volumetrics are confounded by myelin too. The retina is an unmyelinated central nervous system structure. And so the measurements that we derive with OCT are not confounded by myelin. And secondly, GCIP thickness does not seem to increase during inflammation of the optic nerve.   There's been a number of studies showing that during acute optic neuritis peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer thickness increases. There's a number of reasons for that: there's inflammation within the optic nerve, and so there's edema. And so we think that some of that edema may track down to the retinal nerve fiber layer. And there may also be some impaired axonal transport resulting in congested axons within the retinal nerve fiber layer. In addition to that, the retinal nerve fiber layer also contains the bulk of glial cells. And by that, I was mainly referring to astroglia. Now microglia are thought to be present throughout the retina, but there's really no astroglial confound of GCIP thickness as well.   During acute inflammation in the optic nerve, GCIP thickness was not found to increase. And so if you take a patient, as an example, with an acute optic neuritis now, and then you repeat the OCT scan six months later, the GCIP thickness at six months subtracted from that at baseline is felt to be a fairly accurate reflection of net neurodegeneration in terms of net loss of ganglion cell neurons. That absence of edematous or inflammatory or swelling related confound of GCIP thickness yields yet another advantage for this particular measure.   Interviewer – Dan Keller How does the time course of changes in the GCIP correlate with brain MRI? Can it be predictive or are they in lockstep or how do they relate?   Dr. Saidha Yeah, so that's a great question. I think one of the things with OCT research has been that the bulk of research to date has been cross-sectional. And so it has really been one of those key things on our mind is does the way that the GCIP atrophies or thins really mirror what's happening in the brain? In other words, are they locked in together? Are the rates of GCIP atrophy and brain atrophy actually associated with one another, or are they a little disconnected?   So in a recent study, which we published in Annals in Neurology, we tracked a little over 100 MS patients for roughly a four-year period, and we did annual MRI scans with a 3-Tesla scanner, and we did six monthly OCT scans. And very importantly and interestingly, we found that the rate of GCIP atrophy was highly correlated with the rate of brain atrophy and a particular rate of gray matter atrophy. Of course, that's a little bit to be expected partly on the basis of what I said earlier that white matter atrophy in itself is not as well detected as gray matter atrophy.   And then when you look by subtypes of MS – meaning, you know, relapsing MS versus progressive MS – we found that the rate of atrophy was even better or more highly correlated in terms of its association with brain atrophy rate. In fact, it appeared that the rate of retinal atrophy could predict 80% of variance in rate of brain atrophy, which is fascinating because it really does imply that what we're seeing within the retina of MS patients is a reflection of global central nervous system pathology.   And the pathobiological changes that we can detect and monitor with OCT appear to very nicely reflect what's happening within the brain. And that this cheap, noninvasive, easily tolerated, easily repeatable technique that's painless can provide so much insight into this disease process is really quite fascinating and really phenomenal when you consider the increasing and growing need for an ability to measure and monitor neurodegeneration in this disease process. We traditionally conceptualize MS as being an inflammatory demyelinating disorder of the central nervous system, and absolutely there's inflammation that occurs as part of the disease process. And when acute inflammation occurs, there's some immediate damage to axons on the form of axonal transection. And then when axons do not have enough myelin around them or are devoid of myelin over sustained periods of time, that normal protective environment for axons is not present, and so we feel that those axons slowly neurodegenerate.   The advent of putatively neuroprotective and putatively remyelinating therapies now more than ever increases our need for an ability to be able to track neurodegeneration. And in fact, it is neurodegeneration that is the principal substrate of disability in MS. And while the inflammation may be at the root cause of this neurodegeneration, the disability that patients have is better associated with the amount of neurodegeneration that's present. So, it's possible – and we postulate – that OCT could be a very useful outcome measure in terms of assessing therapies which are putatively neuroprotective and/or even neurorestorative or remyelinating.   MSDF Do you think that there is a common process going on more centrally and in the retina causing the changes in both? Or is it possible that there is more central degeneration, which then is transmitted peripherally causing problems in the retina?   Dr. Saidha So that's a great question. We think that the bulk of the retinal changes that we're observing are related to pathology within the optic nerve. And because optic nerve pathology is basically ubiquitous as part of the disease process, we think that the changes that we're seeing within the retina are really just a reflection of what's happening throughout the central nervous system.   Now, you do raise a very important point though. Although we think that the bulk of the change that we're seeing within the retina is related to pathology within the optic nerves, that does not exclude the possibility that some of the changes that we're seeing – in terms of thinning of the retinal nerve fiber layer and GCIP, in particular – are actually related to transsynaptic degeneration. Meaning that if you have a distant lesion or distant pathology that as an axon dies that the next neuron and axon, as part of a sequential chain, is not affected. And that's something that we're actively studying at the moment to try to better understand the effects of transsynaptic degeneration on retinal measures. There is some data to suggest that there is transsynaptic effects on retinal measures, but my own view is that longitudinal studies to definitively establish this are currently lacking.   MSDF Do you have to watch out for a history of optic neuritis when you look at the OCTs? Does that affect what you're finding?   Dr. Saidha I think it does. So, if we are kind of going to say that what we're seeing in the retina is a general reflection of what's happening in the brain, we have to at least consider the possibility that a severe inflammatory event with disproportionate local retinal tissue injury might have an affect on the global relationships between OCT derived measures and brain measures. So, when we look at the relationships between rates of GCIP atrophy and rates of brain atrophy, we find that in eyes with a history of optic neuritis that that relationship is not as strong. And we think that that may be the case because immediately following optic neuritis there's an excessive amount of local tissue injury. And that local tissue injury that results in excessive loss of retinal nerve fiber layer and GCIP tissue somehow masks the global information that we're deriving from OCT.   But then what's interesting is that although a history of optic neuritis seems to be relevant at least in the relapsing-remitting subtype it seems to be less relevant in secondary progressive MS. Part of our hypothesis for this – although it needs to be better elucidated and studied – is that brain atrophy continues on following the optic neuritis, and let's just say it carries on, as an example, at the same rate that it did beforehand. Well eventually, the rate of retinal atrophy, although there was initial disproportionate surge in neurodegeneration within the retina, there will be some ongoing neurodegeneration occurring too. And eventually the two rates will become realigned again in the future.   Kind of to get at that point we also looked at rather than just history of optic neuritis we looked at whether baseline GCIP thickness might have an impact on rate of GCIP atrophy to kind of expand a little bit upon that hypothesis. And indeed, what we found was that rate of GCIP thickness at baseline is highly associated with rate of GCIP atrophy. In kind of simplistic terms the way I conceptualize this is that the more retinal tissue that's available the faster the potential rate of retinal atrophy is. And if there's less retinal tissue available, then there's maybe less potential for that rate to be as fast. If the rate was to remain steady the entire time from the day that the disease first begins – and I think this also applies to the brain too – it wouldn't be very long before there's no tissue left.   MSDF You had alluded to looking at new potential therapies using OCT as an outcome. Does that also mean that it may have utility in looking at current disease-modifying therapies and being able to compare them?   Dr. Saidha So that's an excellent question. In fact, that's actually currently no data available that I'm aware of that has assessed the effect of currently available disease-modifying therapies on rates of GCIP or retinal nerve fiber layer thickness atrophy. And I think that's something that a lot of academics and people who do research utilizing the visual system and a particular OCT would be interested in seeing. We have such data – and such data is routinely collected in terms of effects of disease-modifying therapies – on brain volume, and this is something that's now fairly standard to be collected as part of clinical trials. It may be useful to know whether currently available disease-modifying therapies have differential effects on rates of retinal atrophy. Which would imply that maybe in addition to having a role as an outcome measure in trials of putative neuroprotectants, as well as neurorestorative agents, that maybe OCT might actually also have a role in studies of potentially anti-inflammatory treatments or treatments which modulate or suppress the immune system, as do most currently available licensed disease-modifying therapies.   MSDF Very good. I appreciate it.   Dr. Saidha Thank you very much.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety-two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.  

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety-one of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Jorge Nogales-Gaete, who is Chief of the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Chile in Santiago. We spoke at a neurology conference in Santiago about MS patients' perceptions of their clinical care and the importance of the healthcare team's understanding those perceptions.   Interviewer – Dan Keller Let me ask you about the ethical and clinical imperatives for the healthcare team when they encounter an MS patient to learn their perceptions, to learn their desires, their approach to therapy.   Interviewee – Jorge Nogales-Gaete I think the patient has at least two different condition on other disease, chronical disease. The first is the age. They're too young to have a chronical disease. There's nobody is prepared to have one. You have think about your lives, your project of life, and then you have a strong situation that is the diagnosis. Then, this is unexpected. It's a disruption. It's not natural. When you are old and you have blood hypertension, well you have time to right it. But when you are so young and you have this kind of disease, it's very strong.   And the other situation is that this disease is not usually the same all the time. You have period that you are normal, you have no manifestation, even the diseases on you. And other you have problem. And in each situations, you are thinking very different. Then you must consider in relation with the patient that nothing is stable. In the consideration of the disease, then you must go again to talk about doubt, about risk again and again. And this is different to other chronical disease.   MSDF There's so many variables: there's the patient, the nature of the illness, the nature of the clinician. But also, within the patient is education, knowledge, understanding, age, gender, family, economics. How do you make sense of it all?   Dr. Nogales-Gaete Well I think that the first situation is fear. All patients have fear; it's something new. They have doubts, and this is common. You have more prepare in your cognitive system to aware about this. But the fear is just for all equal. If you are warned, if you listen, what they want to know is more easy. Right situation for each patient, each patient is different. Then you must make the effort to be different for your each patient that you have in this moment.   MSDF Each patient is different from the other patient, but each patient is different over time from what he was before.   Dr. Nogales-Gaete Yes, this is the situation. Then, you must be prepared to take the situation again and again and again and be prepared. I never said we're talking about this. When we talk, we add in another situation, I have another fear, I have another sensation, I have not this problem that now is my problem I want to talk that again.   MSDF When you first see these patients, when they're first diagnosed, do you lay out an entire treatment plan? How do you prepare them for the varying course of the disease?   Dr. Nogales-Gaete I try to never give all the information in one meeting. I prepare the patient. I said well we are searching something, we find something, but we need to see again. Even when you have a second opinion demanded, I just take my time to say well this is the first situation. You are in this, but not to say all the things. Not to say well this is the disease, you need this treatment, this is the situation. No. You’re having a chronical problem, it seems to be autoimmunity, it seems to be of the central nervous system. Probably it's MS, and we need to work it. Then I prepare first the patient, the family, and then arrive to the diagnosis. And what's meaning in term of care, treatment.   MSDF Do you try not to make predictions because if you're wrong the patient may lose trust, may have even more doubt?   Dr. Nogales-Gaete Yes. It's not possible to make prediction; that's the first thing. Then, if you make prediction, probably you are wrong. When you are able to make prediction, it has some value because to make a good prediction you need at least 10 years. And it has in sense a prediction 10 years later. I think well, the general population goes in that way, but it hasn’t sense for you specifically.   MSDF So it sounds like all you can predict is the unpredictability of the disease.   Dr. Nogales-Gaete Yes. And this is important. This is important because you have the possibility to think in a bad scenario but also in a good one.   MSDF Do patients want frequent contact and updates or does it vary by who you're talking to?   Dr. Nogales-Gaete General, at the beginning, the patient need more contact or when the disease goes worse. But in general, no. When they are in good condition, they need to live the good time without a physician or a medical care team.   MSDF What about patients talking to patients or support groups?   Dr. Nogales-Gaete Well, this is a difficult situation. Because you have a vast selection of the person who are very good; they don't want to go to see the person who had in bad condition. Then the selection is person in bad condition. And this not reinforce the spirit. It's a political good situation to represent needs. But to work the spirit it's not a good solution.   MSDF What about learning coping techniques when they have an exacerbation or even emotional coping techniques because of the doubt and unpredictability?   Dr. Nogales-Gaete In this situation, probably it's important the background of the patient: the culture, the individual level. It's more easily the person who have a better condition – educational and economical condition – to adopt methodologies of coping.   MSDF How is it, as a physician, being in a specialty that has such wide-ranging disease type and unpredictability of disease course in the patients? I mean some medical specialties the orthopedist says that's a bad hip; I'm going to replace it. You're in sort of the area that we might say is like nailing Jell-O to the wall; it's very hard to nail it down.   Dr. Nogales-Gaete I think that MS give you the opportunity to think about the real reality. All are vulnerable, all of us. Then people with MS has this more clear. But just more clear, we are talking now, but nobody know about tomorrow. Then life is uncertainty. Then you must to admit that you don't have the control. You have the possibility to moderate something, but then you don't have the control.   MSDF What about approaching general health concerns? Do people look to the neurologist as their general practitioner, or do you have to reinforce with them, yes you have to watch out for your cholesterol and everything else, you need to see someone else also?   Dr. Nogales-Gaete We have a public organization based on family physicians general practice. And then you have to be sended to a specialist. And the specialists in general are more aware about the proper field. Then it's a little bit separate, each problem. It's not a good situation. But, cardiologists give the cardiology solution; neurologists make theirs. We have probably internal medicine is the more complete possibility to see all the patient in a comprehensive way.   MSDF I guess the real question is, do you have to encourage them to also remember they have general health needs too, and those should be addressed by the generalist.   Dr. Nogales-Gaete Yes. You have a problem, but you have the possibility to won two lotteries. Then, you need to attend it. If you are in a good health situation, it's better for all. Then try to be in a good situation about your cholesterol and other things: blood pressure, don't smoke.   MSDF Have we missed anything that's important to address?   Dr. Nogales-Gaete I think that we are in the hope era. Twenty years ago we have no the same tool that we have now. We have another drugs, we have another meaning of the disease; we understand more the patient necessities. Then it's mean more than a single drug that modify the disease. Patient have fatigue, has fear, has doubt, have pain, have depression. And you need to understand all of these things. Because if you make the correct diagnosis and give the drug that modify the illness, nothing happen with the everyday life of the patient. The everyday life need another answer. That mean it's not just a neurologist, it's not just the physician. You need all the health team that work in this patient.   MSDF I appreciate it. Thank you.   Dr. Nogales-Gaete Thank you.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety-one of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.  

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Ninety of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Welcome to the weird world of the U.S. pharmaceutical market. A few outrageous cases of drug price gouging have made the headlines, but in multiple sclerosis, a more serious concern is the steady annual rise in cost of all disease-modifying therapies, or DMTs. So says Dr. Daniel Hartung, a researcher at the Oregon State University/Oregon Health and Science University College of Pharmacy. In a recent study, he found that MS drug prices over time outpaced both inflation and similar biologics. It’s not just the new drugs. As each more expensive DMT comes to market, the prices of older drugs also race to catch up. It’s affecting the drugs available to patients and causing other concerns.   Interviewer – Carol Morton Can you tell me what questions you were asking and why?   Interviewee – Daniel Hartung Sure. So the study that we did had its origin after having some conversations with some neurologists at OHSU about increasing frequency of seeing their patients facing larger and larger, not only cost sharing and copays from the insurance companies for drugs for MS, but also increasing restrictions, typically from insurance companies in kind of what medications they were supposed to take first prior to perhaps failing one, then going to another medication for MS. And so this is all kind of happening in the context of what they were seeing as just higher prices for some of these medications.   And so what we decided to do is…no one's really done this…is look at in a systematic way the trajectory of pricing for MS drugs, essentially since their approval until we went through the end of 2013. And to look at what the just general trend was, try to figure out if there were certain specific factors that were associated with higher prices over time, like the approval of newer agents, things like that. That was kind of the general objective of the study.   MSDF And then how did you go about conducting this study? Is it hard to find that data?   Dr. Hartung It can be. So I'm fortunate to have access to some data set that has longitudinal pricing data for pharmaceuticals for the past 30 years or so. And so from my perspective, it wasn't difficult. But essentially we used this data set that collected average wholesale price, as well as wholesale acquisition cost, so kind of the two usual, most common (I'll call them) sticker prices for drugs. And so this data set for all medications, it kind of tracked pricing of medications over time. And so that was the core data set for our analysis.   MSDF And so you pulled the multiple sclerosis disease-modifying therapies out of that. How many did you look at?   Dr. Hartung So in our study we looked at 11 medications for MS. They included the three what are typically called platform therapies that have been on the market for about 20 years now. Those include Avonex, Copaxone, and Betaseron, and just followed them through time, through the approval of several other new agents, like Tysabri. And then there's in the last five to six or seven years, the FDA has approved several agents that can be taken orally, Gilenya, Aubagio, and Tecfidera now. And there was a couple other kind of miscellaneous agents that were kind of variants of the interferons and things like that.   MSDF And then what did you find?   Dr. Hartung Well, there are several interesting things, but I think one of the most striking things is that the prices for the platform therapies, Avonex, Betaseron, and Copaxone, were pretty stable for at least 10 years from their approval in early to mid-90s. And then, essentially what we observed is that new agents that came on the market, starting with Rebif in about 2001, came out, and they were usually priced about 20% to 30% higher than the existing therapies. And what we observed is that when these new agents came out or approved, that these higher prices, the cost or the price of kind of the platform therapies quickly escalated to almost match the price of the newer agents that were approved. And this pattern kind of repeated itself and actually became more intense when the newer oral agents came on the market in the last five or six years.   So the cumulative effect of that is in the early 2000s, Copaxone, Betaseron, and Avonex were priced about $10,000 to $15,000 a year. And at the end of our study, all of the agents that are currently approved were priced between $50,000 and $60,000 per year. And so we tried to quantify kind of the rate of increase and compare that with other kind of benchmarks: inflation, prescription drug inflation. What we found is that the price increase for those agents was well above what you'd expect for not only just general inflation, but also prescription drug inflation.   MSDF MS drugs, the cost of all of them, not just the new ones, are increasing at a rate higher than any other drug category?   Dr. Hartung In addition to looking at kind of standard metrics of inflation, we compared the price increases for the platform therapies to what we considered kind of comparable biologics. So we looked at a class of medications called tumor necrosis factor inhibitors, which are used for immunologic conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. And what we found is that the price increases for the platform therapies for MS increased substantially and significantly above price increases for those medications for the tumor necrosis factor inhibitor. So from our study, from our perspective, prices increased higher than they did for these TNF inhibitors.   We haven't really compared them across other classes of drugs, but there are some new publications that have looked at price increases for other agents, such as in other classes like insulin, drugs for diabetes, and cancer agents as well. The numbers are slightly different, but the trajectories look pretty similar. So in the last, you know, 10 years, there's been almost it seems like a logarithmic increase in the price of many of these agents and classes.   MSDF So is this a case of a system that has incentives that maybe aren't as well matched to patient needs as they should? What's going on here?   Dr. Hartung I mean, that's a good question. Definitely there's a system. The market-based system for pharmaceuticals in the United States is incredibly dysfunctional in that it's very dissimilar from any other kind of consumer market for technology, phones, cars, things like that, where you typically see prices go down after a while. And you don't see that in health care or in drugs. You see just prices increase. And so there's a dysfunction that just kind of is core to the economics of health care.   And then I think there is an element of pharmaceutical industries pricing these agents essentially what the market will bear. Now my opinion is that a lot of the aggressive increases in price were initially seen with some of the cancer agents. And so I think that in that field there is a kind of pushing of the envelope for many anti-cancer drugs that's now has proliferated to other classes of drugs, including MS agents.   The other element that's kind of unclear and adds to the murkiness to this is that, you know, our study and other studies that have looked at what I'm calling pricing of the agents use average wholesale or WAC and with some sort of adjustments for rebates or discounts. So typically third party payers or pharmaceutical benefits managers will negotiate with pharmaceutical industry to lower the cost of the agent for the payer. But all that information is typically proprietary, and so it's really difficult to know what the actual cost of the medication is, unless you're paying cash. If you're paying cash, then the cost is going to be pretty close to the price that's set. So people who don't have insurance are paying the most, and the people with insurance, Medicaid, any sort of governmental insurance, they're paying typically AWP minus a certain proportion or WAC plus a proportion percentage essentially based on the rebate that they get.   So that adds a little bit of kind of uncertainty. Pharmaceutical industry may come back to say that, you know, we're giving pretty good discounts on certain medications in certain payers, but from the data we have and the pricing data, there's just been this aggressive increasing in prices. And we don't know if it's being mitigated by increasing rebates and discounts over time. So it's complicated.   MSDF What do you hope people will do with this information? It does sound like a complicated system that's almost unapproachable for the individual patient or individual doctor. What can people start doing now? Where does the responsibility or responsibilities lie?   Dr. Hartung You know, I think that the data we generated in our study has been useful for some of the advocacy groups in the multiple sclerosis community. So the National Multiple Sclerosis Society has been using it to try to, you know, advocate or perhaps political reforms or some other meaningful reforms in kind of how these things are reimbursed, things like that. Drug prices has been in the news quite a bit over the last several years, and now even more with the election season in full tilt. And so I think a lot of the candidates are talking about potential solutions to the issue.   From the patient's perspective, they're in a real quandary in a sense that even a sharp move with the Affordable Care Act to a lot of high deductible, high cost sharing plans where if your monthly cost of a MS agent is $5,000, you pay 20% of it until you hit your deductible. You know, that's $1,000 at the pharmacy, and that's a pretty big out-of-pocket cost that you face. So I think that there's some, you know, movement in the advocacy groups to try to…especially working with insurance companies to make sure that access is open because these medications are incredibly individualized. And there's not really good predictors of who will respond to each type of medication, and they're all different. Some of them are administered subcutaneously, intramuscularly, orals, and so there's some patient preferences that fall into play here as well as the price. And so I think there's been some movement and some discussion making sure that access to all the agents is relatively easy for patients.   But from a solutions to the pricing situation, you know, I think we're still kind of in discussion phases about what we can do as a country to kind of deal with this issue because it's not exclusive to the MS drugs.   MSDF So what's next with you? Are you following up on this?   Dr. Hartung So from our perspective, the group that I worked with, the two neurologists' project, we just submitted a grant, well, it was in January, that we hope to be competitive and hope to get that's looking at how these high drug prices actually affect patients in terms of their medication taking and potentially adverse outcomes because they're not taking their medication. Either they're hitting access restrictions from insurance companies or they just can't afford or have problems with the cost sharing or something like that, and so trying to quantify how this is affecting patients. And so from a research perspective, I think that's kind of our next move.   My colleagues, my two neurologist colleagues, they're really active in kind of speaking with representatives at the state about the issue, bringing it to increased visibility from our elected officials as well as making sure that the MS Society is aware of kind of the current status of the pricing trajectory. So we've been updating our graph that we published as new agents come online and things like that.   MSDF Can you give us a couple of the updates you've made since the study?   Dr. Hartung They haven't been dramatic, but there's been a couple new agents that have been approved. And I guess most notably is that the first generic drug for MS was approved, I believe, last April. So a generic for Copaxone came online. I think there's two manufacturers of it. When it came online, there was one. And so I think it was priced just modestly lower than the brand name Copaxone. But something interesting also just dealing with Copaxone, which is the number one MS drug in terms of sales, so when Copaxone lost its patents and lost its kind of patent disputes, in preparation for that, Teva released a different formulation of Copaxone.   So Copaxone is traditionally a daily injection. And so they released a three-times-a-week higher strength injection and basically switched everyone from the once-a-day to the three-times-a week 40-mg injection. And so I think a large proportion of patients who were originally on the once-daily Copaxone were switched to the 40-mg three-times-a-week Copaxone. So that really to some extent mitigated if there's any sort of savings due to this new generics in the field, kind of really mitigated any kind of savings due to the new generic as most people are now on the 40-mg three-times-a-week product. And the generic is not substitutable for the 40-mg three-times-a-week product. So that's a very common tactic in pharmaceutical industry approach to try to like sustain their franchise with a particular drug that's going off patent.   But the big questions are the ones that don't have a good answer. Essentially, what do patients do about this? What do we do as a society to deal with this issue? And you know, there's been proposals that have been put out by different elected officials and other folks about, you know, we should allow Medicare to aggressively and directly negotiate with pharmaceutical industry on price. We should allow importation of medications from other countries, similar industrialized countries like Canada. So the United States pays by far and away the highest prices than any other country in the world. And so many people think that we should be able to import these drugs that are the same drugs that are going to Canada into the United States. You know, some people suggest that there should be some sort of forms of price control. You know, maybe medications shouldn't be allowed to increase 10% a year or something like that.   And so all of these are being kind of discussed and played out and the pros and cons are weighed. And whenever you talk about limiting price increases, the usual response you get from industry is that any constraint on the amount of money that they're able to make and the profits that they're able to make for their shareholders is going to have some sort of effect on kind of future innovation potentially. Whether that comes to bear or not is unclear, but that's usually the number one response you get is that we need to have these high profits in place because it's an incredibly risky endeavor that we're doing. Only a very small proportion of drugs that are under development actually make it through the developmental process and are approved and make it to market. So any constraint on profits is going to have an effect in terms of future innovations and future breakthrough medications and things like that. Incentives are a big…they are real. And so that is something that needs to be weighed carefully in kind of any solution, essentially. I don't think it's the best solution, but just people are talking about a wide variety of things, I think.   MSDF I appreciate your raising all these issues and going through the study. Is there anything else that I haven't asked that you wanted to add or emphasize as take-home lessons? Something to mitigate the rage, I don't know… [laughter]?   Dr. Hartung Yeah, well I mean there's been a lot with all this, you know, the Valeant Pharmaceutical issue and the other company, Martin Shkreli guy who's castigated for increasing the price of this drug for toxoplasmosis by like 5,000% and buying the company and jacking up the price. That's a separate phenomenon of what is happening. But I think the outrage over that type of exploitation of the dysfunctional pharmaceutical market kind of masks and kind of hides the other issues that are happening on a consistent and aggressive basis in terms of just regular 6% to 10% increases in price on a year-to-year basis for drugs that a lot of people use, like drugs for diabetes or MS products, cancer agents, things like that. And so, you know, you have these really highly visible cases of really dramatic increases that are kind of morally outrageous. They draw your attention from the real and kind of moderate but aggressive and year in, year out, increases that are seen across the board in a lot of different agents. And that's where our focus should be essentially.   MSDF That's helpful. Well, thank you so much.   Dr. Hartung Yeah. My pleasure.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Ninety of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-nine of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller.   Today's interview features Dr. Charity Evans, assistant professor of pharmacy at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. After a drug is on the market, systematically evaluating hospital admissions and the reasons for them can add new evidence for its effectiveness or adverse effects. By using clinical data from the British Columbia MS database and linking it to health system databases for MS patients, Dr. Evans evaluated the effect of beta-interferon on hospital event rates compared to those not on beta-interferon. She tells us what led up to this study.   Interviewee – Charity Evans This was part of a larger study that was looking at long-term effects of beta-interferons, and we wanted to see if there was any impact of the interferons on hospitalization rates.   Interviewer – Dan Keller And what did you do to look at it?   Dr. Evans So we used data from two different sources in British Columbia. We had a clinical data set that has collected clinical data on patients since 1980, and then we linked that with health administrative data in BC; so we were able to get information on individual’s hospitalizations as well as the drugs that they were taking, and we used that to see if there was any effect of the beta-interferons on their hospitalization rates.   MSDF And this was per patient per month or year, some time frame?   Dr. Evans Yup. We actually looked at each individual patient in this study on a monthly basis; and so we each month said did you have any hospitalizations this month, yes or no, or how many did you have? And then we looked at their drug exposure, and we did that in two different ways; so we looked at were you on drug at that time that we were measuring you – so monthly – and we were looking at cumulative drug exposure, so how much drug had you been exposed to prior to that time, as well.   We actually found that there wasn’t any differences between the people who had been exposed to beta-interferon either currently or cumulatively compared to those who had no exposure to beta-interferon on the hospitalization rates.   MSDF But what about any individual outcomes?   Dr. Evans So with a secondary analysis, we also looked at specific reasons for hospitalizations, and we did find that there did seem to be a beneficial effect of the beta-interferons on hospitalizations related to respiratory diseases; so those individuals who had a higher cumulative exposure to beta-interferon over time actually had less hospitalizations for respiratory diseases.   MSDF Does that take into account both infectious diseases as well as anything respiratory, like COPD or any other things that would affect the lungs?   Dr. Evans Yup, that includes all of them. We did look at kind of the specific diagnosis for these patients and the majority were respiratory infections, so things like pneumonia or influenza.   MSDF Do you have any idea what might account for that?   Dr. Evans We have two thoughts. The first one is because the majority of hospitalizations were due to infections, we know that the beta-interferons have antiviral activity, so we thought is it this kind of an antimicrobial or immunoregulatory effect that the interferons were resulting in these lower hospitalization rates. And then the second one is a far less scientific thought, but we also wondered if people who are on drug, are they seen by healthcare professionals more regularly than someone who isn’t, and if that’s the case are they receiving more messages about preventative strategies for these types of infections; so when it’s flu season, are these people hearing more about the flu shots and getting a flu shot more than someone who maybe doesn’t see a healthcare professional as much?   MSDF Could the interferon, because it’s working on their MS, have any beneficial effect in terms of neuromuscular function of respiratory muscles?   Dr. Evans That one I wouldn’t be able to comment on specifically yet.   MSDF Can you sort of dissect this by looking at patients on other disease-modifying therapies, which if they had the same reduction in respiratory might say that it’s not a direct antiviral effect but could be neurologic or healthcare access?   Dr. Evans Yeah, that would definitely be the way to do it. This study specifically looked at the interferons; again, that was how the study was designed, but for sure if you included glatiramer acetate, as well, or some of the newer agents. At the time of this study for sure we didn’t have enough long-term data on the newer agents to be able to include them, but that’s certainly something that we’d be looking at in the future.   MSDF So where do you take this in the future?   Dr. Evans So we are, as you suggest, wanting to look at the newer agents and seeing if there is any impact of that, as well, so that would probably be the next step that we would do.   MSDF If it were a direct antiviral effect, wouldn’t you expect to see it on other viral diseases? But I guess they’re much less common so events might be less.   Dr. Evans And this might just be a complete chance finding, as well. Respiratory infections are more common in MS to begin with, so we didn’t notice it with other types of infections. But this is a secondary outcome so we weren’t looking specifically for this, so it might be something that if we tease out a study that that was a primary endpoint we might find differences, as well.   MSDF If there was no overall effect on hospitalizations but there was a lower level of hospitalization for respiratory problems, was there an increase in other things that accounted for this zeroing out?   Dr. Evans We didn’t see any statistically significant increases in any of the other areas.   MSDF Sort of the difference between mortality and all-cause mortality, I’m sort of thinking, in the same way that you don’t want to prevent one and raise the other.   Dr. Evans Right, yeah. You know, our findings did kind of coincide with right around the time where the 21-year followup of the initial pivotal trials of the beta-interferons came out where they did show a lower mortality related to respiratory infections, as well. Our findings kind of fit with that, as well, but as for the specific reason why I can’t say for sure.   MSDF Can you reach any conclusions or recommendations?   Dr. Evans Well, we didn’t see a beneficial effect of the interferons on hospitalizations, but I think it was also reassuring in that we didn’t see a spike in any kind of hospitalizations, or we didn’t see one particular type of hospitalization occurring. And so I think that is a good sign that there don’t seem to be any serious long-term effects or adverse effects that are happening with the interferons. So this is just kind of another, I guess, support for that, that these seem like they’re pretty safe drugs over the long term.   MSDF Very good, thanks.   Dr. Evans Thanks.   [transition music]   MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-nine of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

Full transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. You may have heard of transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment for migraine, neuropathic pain, and treatment-resistant depression using an electromagnet positioned on the scalp. Dr. John Hart, a professor of neurology and neurotherapeutics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, is now testing another electrical technique called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, as well as alternating current to improve cognition in brain disorders, potentially including MS. An even more directed form, called high definition tDCS, allows more precise targeting of brain areas. The experimental procedure involves placing electrodes strategically on the outside of the head. We spoke in his office about how he's going about developing the technique and how it may eventually be combined with other therapeutic modalities. Interviewer – Dan Keller You're working in transcranial direct current stimulation. Basically, what is it; how does it work or be applied? Interviewee – John Hart tDCS is short for that. You'll have an electrode – actually it's a sort of small doughnut, so it's not such electrodes that people think of tiny little electrodes – and you place one on one part of the scalp area, and then another part, and you're basically going to pass current through the head in a sort of diffuse, generalized way, not very specific, from that one electrode to the other. Recently, a new sort of area has been developed, a new cap system approach called high definition transcranial direct current stimulation. It's an EEG cap with EEG electrodes on them, and you can pass current out one electrode and draw it in a variety of other electrodes. So you can target it to specific areas where it's coming out, and you can also direct it as to where it goes through to multiple, depending on how specific or not, brain regions that you're going to have the electrode come out. So if you want to hit one spot, you can go out one and bring it in its surrounders and keep all the current there, or you can go from one place to another. And in some instances, we're able to throw it – sort of like throwing your voice – down the deep structures and sort of hit those as a way of stimulating. The other part about it is the direct current part. We also do alternating currents, or HD TACS, and we can do frequencies and other things, too. So I feel that this has got a fair amount of promise and flexibility as a way to externally stimulate brain areas pretty safely. It does a little tingling to your scalp kind of side effects in terms of application. MSDF What kind of currents and voltages does it involve? Dr. Hart Right now normally in tDCS in the big things, we do 2 milliamps ballpark. We find that 1 milliamp is about where we're functioning now at the high definition, and right now we're doing studies with it where we're playing around with the amps and different frequencies to see – since it's relatively a new technique – what sort of effects you get. So … it's so new there's not a ton of papers out about it for me to tell you where we're going to land, will there be a dose-response curve? We're doing those studies right now.   MSDF You've said that you’re interested, in general, in cognition across all sorts of brain disorders—Alzheimer's, MS, others. What's the hypothesis for using this kind of stimulation? Dr. Hart Well, in my primary research area I do word retrieval and knowledge retrieval and storage, so we've mapped out in that example a circuit of the pre-SMA, the pre-supplementary motor area, and the caudate and the thalamus that's involved in retrieving a memory. So when I say desert and humps, does that make you think of a specific object? When camel pops into your head, we mapped out with fMRI, EEG depth, and electrodes this sort of electrical pattern of that retrieval circuit to effectively pull up that memory. So the way we've been doing it, we came up with this circuit in normal people, and we've seen certain disease states where it's dysfunctional, and MS happens to be one of them. So we're directing, right now, our current to the pre-SMA and trying to stimulate that circuit to hopefully have a less functional circuit become more functional, where it can pull out the signal to noise and fire off the right rhythms or get their rhythms in a correct pattern that are not there. Psychiatry's done a lot better in terms of treatments, because a lot of the disorders are based on neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter states, that a drug will affect those neurotransmitters, and it hits all the areas, because it's more the transmitter than the place. Cognition has a lot to do with place and connectivity. Drugs, we've not got a ton of them as the primary cognitive treatment because they don't go to a specific place, and they don't effectively change that specific area's connectivity and/or its links. I have a big study we just finished with RTMS [repetitive transcranial magnet stimulation] in PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder]. I look at the fact that having worked as an electrician of cognition for years, that that's what the circuit is, and the best way for me to change cognitive status in the way that it's lined up its focal networks is probably not showering a brain with drug that won’t go to specific areas but maybe targeting things like electrical and magnetic current. MSDF In terms of MS or other diseases, have you done any clinical studies so far? Dr. Hart So we're right in the middle of doing some MS patients preliminarily. And I don't get excited easily – I'm normally a pessimist, I think, at heart for these things. We've had some encouraging results in having people not on meds or who have failed meds or not had a response to meds that we've looked at retrieving memory in both word retrieval and in episodic memory retrieval and seen some improvements that have been relatively reasonably long-lasting from my point of view, lasting over months. But we've only at this point done about 5 or 6 people and we're enrolling more folks. We had a grant proposal in and we needed to get more folks to do a bigger trial. We're doing some placebo and then add people later to also see how much of this is a fair sort of setup as a placebo effect versus not. So we're advancing getting more and more folks into those stages now. And we've tried a few folks with TBI [traumatic brain injury]. MSDF How long do you apply the treatment. Is it a one-shot deal and what's the residual effect? You said you've had benefit up to months, is that from a series or from just once? Dr. Hart We're doing one-shot now as a way of figuring out dosing and effectiveness, since it's a relatively new device. The way we're doing the treatments for folks is to do 20-minute sessions and 10 of those over a 2-week period. So once a day, 20 minutes, for a total of 10 sessions. And that has seem to have been from animal studies and some other folks in the literature reasonable time and reasonable number of sessions at this point. We're going to figure out and look at more about adjusting dose, dose response, will we need boosters if it starts fading, and things like that. Its affect fades, because in essence these folks are not treated with modafinil or stimulants that we're doing this, so we're not doing it in conjunction with that. So they're not receiving what are typical cognitive treating medications in MS. So that's a plus side, and that we haven't had any serious any sort of residual side effect things at this point. So if it lasted several months and you had to reapply a booster thing, compared to taking amphetamines or some of the other pro-amphetamine drugs, I think the upside is reasonable enough to say that compared to that, it would be a reasonable issue if you came in 4 times a year if that's what we need to do. But we'll see as we keep following folks. MSDF If it works as you said, kind of separates out the signal from noise, essentially boosts the signal, the signal is gone when you turn it off or when someone leaves the treatment room. So what do you think, something's happening biochemically, or what's it doing that gives you a long-lasting effect? Dr. Hart When we just finish our RTMS trial for post-traumatic stress disorder, one of our interesting findings was the length of time, or the time when the effect lasts, or how long it lasts and continues. So there are some studies on electrical stimulation in animal models that suggests that what it does is set up a state called meta-plasticity. And the meta-plasticity in the animal models support the fact that long-term potentiation and synaptic potentials that can be set up down the road are actually benefited from the electrical stimulation. And that's what's encouraged us a little bit looking at stuff to see why these things last, because the first thing always like a single-shot, it fades off, it fades away. Luckily, for some of this stuff we have some guidance from animal models. And this meta-plasticity phenomena has been noted for a continue – or delayed almost – effect of when you see improvement because of this. I think it's a state potential change that long-term potentiation can occur down the road. That's our best guess at this point. MSDF You said besides direct current stimulation, you're also trying alternating current. With a direct current, you probably would not get anything analogous to a magnetic stimulation because you wouldn’t set up a magnetic field. Do you see differences between your direct current stimulation and your alternating current stimulation? Dr. Hart We sure have – and I must admit none of this has been published yet because we're trying to set parameters. Initially, the enthusiasm for alternate current stimulation waned a lot, I think, for folks for any of these things, because it didn't seem to be nearly as effective as direct current. And I think as a lot of this stuff initially was done in normals. And I'm not so sure that when you have patients with a disease state, depending on what the disease state is, that I'm willing to sort of say that alternating current is not necessarily going to be useful or not. Also, this is very directional, so here's anode and cathode. So you can take the same current, same electrodes, change the directionality and get different effects. And typically people that found those things in the motor system were pretty noticeable. In cognitive systems, we haven't seen that as much, that when we flip the direction of the current, that we're getting the opposite effects—so instead of enhancing a performance in something, that we're knocking it out. So I think once we look at sort of these things, every new approach has to be taken really as a start from scratch, do the hard work of just what we're doing, change the amplitudes, change the parameters, change the direction in a nice, safe way in single shots, and which we've been doing, and then record pre- and post. We do a lot of electophys measures, but also cognitive measures and other sorts of measures to see how each one of these effects things, and do we have something that I would hope one day I'll be writing electrical prescriptions. And I'll say you should get F4 to CZ current at 1 milliamp or 0.5 milliamps, or whatever I wind up doing, for 10 sessions, 20 minutes. Or, no, my god, look at this, we've got to go from here to here at a different milliamp. Once we start looking at that, I think to me also frequencies are very important; can I send different frequencies instead of milliamps. We're going to discover a lot of different things work differently, especially in diseases that are not a homogeneous thing. Brain disease is not like liver cancer. Hepatocytes, it's like how many hepatocytes are not working and how big is the tumor? No, not having a good thalamus is very different than not having a functional motor cortex, you just see entirely different results. So I think it's going to be a lot more complicated, but I think doing it in a systematic way in normals, and then applying it to certain disease states gives us our best chance at coming up with primary or as adjunct treatments to other ways we're going to be treating diseases that have cognitive problems. MSDF It doesn't seem surprising that the polarity wouldn't matter, because not all the neurons, dendrites, and synapses are lined up in one direction; they're going in all different directions, so even their polarity is different. It seems like zapping it in one direction for one, but the opposite direction for the other anyway. Dr. Hart We've actually done stuff with EEG measures and fMRI measures, and done these things called Granger causality models. So how much does, say, one time point predict an activation or a change in the other time point? And in an area that we thought was really this guy is telling that guy what to do, we found that most of those were predominantly a lot of two-way interactions that are constantly going on, and there's a lot of feedback between these systems. And I always try to think like neurons and think electrically, and I can do it for about a couple hours and then my head starts really hurting. And in reality, I think the simplistic: Turn this light switch on and that you have a serial processing circuit is not really how electrically two neurons are always working together, or talking to each other, or keeping a tone or a level up. So I think you're right, I learn a lot every day. It's been sort of a cool job to figure out, yeah, that makes sense, because really it's an interactive set of neuronal firings. MSDF Do you see any role for combining it with drugs that have ionotropic effects? Dr. Hart Yeah, I do. And the other part of that is going to be really, to me, which I think has been a problem with a lot of approaches to cognition and treating them, the timing of when and how you add different therapies together are going to be very, very important. Even now to say, all right, let's say I want to do a behavioral therapy with HD [high definition?] tDCS, well do you do it during it, do you do the HD tDCS continually? Do you pre-prep the brain by doing that first, and then doing cognitive rehabilitation strategies and therapies? I think we glibly just put things together without thinking that there might be an order to this. So right now we're looking at what's called state changes. We're not the first folks to do this, but some people say before you do tDCS, and that's before this HD stuff, you do a little RTMS first to set the state of the neurons in that area so they're more receptive to whatever you're going to do with the tDCS. MSDF Just to be clear on it, RTMS is repetitive transcranial magnet stimulation. Dr. Hart So I think we're looking at kind of like, you know what, you get your pre-meds before you get your chemo so you don't vomit or do this or that. We might be finding ways that electrically how we're going to, or even you use meds prior to a treatment electrically, or vice versa, that that timing is going to be where the money is in terms of working out what are going to be the most effective therapies. MSDF What have we missed? I realize it's still pretty early, but is there anything important to add? Dr. Hart I think the way we've done it is not going to always be available, in that we came from a circuit that we worked out, and we have an idea as to what we were trying to do. And we're measuring all these brain rhythms as outcome measures, so I know when I'm supposed to see alpha and beta rhythms to do that. And I think what's going to happen is we're not always going to have these circuits, we're going to have a spot. Like we've talked a little bit, shall we try to hit the hippocampus? And what other diseases would you do these things in? And the question's going to be when you're doing that, or doing that as a general approach, how do you smartly do it, when you really are not sure about the circuit? We don't have a ton of really well worked out cognitive circuits in an active state of doing things. We have a lot of functional connectivity rest states, and you say I'd like to amp up that connectivity. I don't know what that does functionally, if you electrically take a rest state that normally is when your eyes close and add current to it. So I think while we've targeted this in the two areas that we're using electrical therapy in, post-traumatic stress disorder and this, and the things we've chosen, we built it off of normal studies. The things we've got to be careful about, thoughtful about, and open-minded to at the same time about, is what if we want to treat something different than this? We want to do working memory, we want to do episodic memory, we want to do frontal behavioral problems. And if we don't have a circuit, try our best to get the most reasonable pre/post measures. Do single shots just to see what it does in a transient state, and then sort of work our way through the fact that at least a reasonable pre/post model and start thinking of this not as one-size-fits-all, but may be 0.5 milliamps, maybe TACS, maybe pink noise, maybe whatever sort of way you want to deal with it. It's going to take a lot more thought, I think, than people might casually say, hey, got some electrodes? I mean, what bugs me right now is you can set up your own tDCS device off the internet, one of them using a car battery – 2 pieces of metal and some wire. And I highly would tell all those out there, which I know none of your listeners, don't do that. So when people started sort of exploring around in what they're going to do, I hope as we take this field further that we need to do it in a systematized fashion and a thoughtful way, because there's a lot of information you can get when something doesn't work. So you know what, I didn't change a thing here when I did this. Well, I would like to know that, you know, is somebody else trying to do it, and try to collect this information that might be useful to other people trying to do things. Saying, you know what, we did this electrodes, these are these things in normals or whatevers and didn't get a response, to try to come up with a way that we've got to take it for the fact that it's like a med. It's going to have schedules, it's going to have doses. So if you're taking it twice a day at 5 mg or 6 times a day at 40 mg, working all that out is going to clearly need to be done in a reasonable, thoughtful way. MSDF I appreciate it, thanks. Dr. Hart Oh, thank you so much, I really appreciate your interest. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Animal data, laboratory studies, and even some human evidence suggest that restricting caloric intake may have a salutary effect on diseases that involve inflammation, possibly including MS. I spoke with Dr. Ellen Mowry of Johns Hopkins University at last fall's ECTRIMS meeting in Barcelona about the rationale for testing caloric restriction in patients with MS and a study that she's carrying out in this regard. Interviewee – Ellen Mowry Laura Piccio and Anne Cross at Wash U, among others, looked at calorie restriction in a mouse model of MS, EAE. And they were able to show that reducing calories prior to the disease reduces the disease and/or its severity. And there are a lot of other in vitro data, other mouse models, and even some human data from other patient populations suggesting that intermittent fasting or intermittent calorie restriction not only reduces inflammation, but may improve oxidative stress handling in mitochondrial function. So we were really interested in whether the ecological observation that the incidence of MS increasing sort of is tied to the same time period in obesity epidemic and that Langer-Gould has showed, among others, that childhood obesity, especially in girls, seems to be a risk factor for MS. So could we be just eating too much, and is that sort of contributing to a burden of MS risk or to a worse prognosis? So we're doing a trial—it's funded by the National MS Society—of a controlled feeding trial where we're randomizing people to either continuing a sort of traditional western diet at the same level of calories they would need to maintain their current weight; to eating that diet most days, but two days a week having only 25% of their caloric needs for that day; or to a group where that same number of calories or percentage of calories is restricted, but spread out over a week. So we should be able to look at the relative impact of just weight reduction, for example, versus the timing of calorie intake to some extent. And we're also really curious to see like when we're done with the early phase of that study, which is eight weeks and we'll be providing foods to people, whether or not patients can sustain that diet afterwards for a longer period of time. Because I think there's really great building rationale for evaluating diet as a potential modifier of the disease. But the other side of studying diet and dietary modifications in people with MS is that we don't know how to encourage people and help them participate in meaningful lifestyle changes that are sustainable. So I think we need to look at that carefully as well. Interviewer – Dan Keller Is there any gradient of incidence of MS by BMI? Dr. Mowry So Annette's study really showed a pretty strong impact of adolescent obesity in girls on MS risk with I would think about a fourfold increase in the odds of developing MS if you were an extremely obese adolescent girl compared to a normal or underweight. And other studies have looked at this as well and shown a very similar set of results. So I would call it sort of a fourth environmental risk factor for MS. I think enough studies have shown a similar association that we can consider that a likely risk factor at this point. MSDF In your study on caloric restriction, are you giving any thought to the composition of the diet? Or are you going to be heavy on carbohydrates, minimize fats, the reverse? Dr. Mowry So we're actually aiming for the 50th percentile of the typical American diet for all the macronutrients, fat, carbo, and protein. The reason is we really want to study the concept of caloric restriction in isolation, and in particular, in a pilot study where you don't have a huge number of people, you can't alter too many things, or there's going to be too much noise and you're not going to know what is what. So certainly I think looking at the macronutrient content of the diet as a separate study would be very interesting and informative, but in this study we're actually trying to control, to just sort of keep it at like what typical Americans are eating. So we're really isolating the effects of the timing of calorie and the amount of calorie intake. MSDF What have we missed or is important to add or interesting? Dr. Mowry I'm just really encouraged, I think, that the MS community is getting more interested in diet and even exercise and other lifestyle modifications that might be important for people with MS. And Ruth Ann Marrie's work looking at comorbidities in MS and demonstrating that people with MS, who are otherwise healthy, are at lower risk of bad outcomes than people who have comorbid illnesses like diabetes and hypertension and that sort of stuff means that we maybe should be focusing on promoting the overall health of our patients, too, to sort of prevent or minimize the effect of some of these comorbid illnesses. So I think it's really a great step that we're starting to think about investigating diet and exercise in our patients. MSDF Good. I appreciate it. Thanks. Dr. Mowry Thank you very much. Full transcript: [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

Full transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-Six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. A hallmark of multiple sclerosis is a new brain lesion. The active inflammation normally goes away in about 4 to 6 weeks, disappearing from contrast-enhanced detection by MRI scans. More recently, in some people with MS, researchers have found smaller longer-lasting inflammatory lesions outside the brain, in the surrounding lining called the leptomeninges, as well as evidence that they may play a role in progressive disease. The tiny compartments are associated with more severe disability, worse outcomes, and nearby gray matter demyelination. Dr. Pavan Bhargava, a neuroimmunology fellow at the Johns Hopkins University MS Center in Baltimore, Maryland, has started a phase I trial to slow progressive disease by targeting the B cells in these follicles. He is testing an anti-B cell antibody called rituximab, using the drug intrathecally—that is, injecting it directly into the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with primary or secondary progressive MS, so that more of it reaches the inflamed pockets in the brain lining. We spoke at the ECTRIMS meeting last fall in Barcelona, where he described to me the rationale for this experimental treatment approach. Interviewee – Pavan Bhargava In 2004, what was noted was that in autopsies of MS patients, there were collections of lymphoid cells in the meninges, and these aggregates of lymphoid cells were noted to abut areas of the cortex that demonstrated demyelination. So this suggested that possibly these collections of B and T lymphocytes that were in the meninges might be driving some of the cortical demyelination that is seen commonly in patients who have progressive MS. So the idea behind using rituximab intrathecally is that we want to, first of all, get as much rituximab as possible into the CSF [cerebral spinal fluid] and into the brain, because when we give rituximab IV, less than 0.1% usually gets into the CNS [central nervous system]. So we're trying to target the B cells that are found in these lymphoid follicles, and we're trying to get as much of the rituximab into the CNS as possible. So that's the rationale behind using intrathecal rituximab in progressive MS patients. Interviewer – Dan Keller Do the patients you're selecting just have visible leptomeningeal lesions, or do they have to have abnormal CSF – IgG elevated or oligoclonal bands – or how are you selecting them? Dr. Bhargava So in our trial, we are selecting patients using an MRI finding that was described now a couple of years ago that on a time-delayed post-contrast flare image, in about a third of MS patients you can actually see contrast-enhancing lesions, not in the brain parenchyma, but actually in the leptomeninges. And a recent paper from the NIH showed that in a couple of these patients who had contrast-enhancing leptomeningeal lesions, when they came to autopsy they could identify clusters of lymphocytes and macrophages that corresponded to these contrast-enhancing leptomeningeal lesions. So in our study, we're basically screening progressive MS patients with an MRI, and are only including patients in this study who do have evidence of these leptomeningeal contrast-enhancing lesions, because we feel that this is a marker of leptomeningeal inflammation in these patients.   MSDF And have you run any patients yet? Dr. Bhargava So we have 5 patients currently in the study, of whom 4 have actually completed their treatment phase of the trial. And our goal in this study is to enroll 12 patients. And the primary outcome is safety. So, you know, we want to know that using rituximab intrathecally in MS is safe. But our secondary outcomes include looking at the change in the MRI lesions that we noted at baseline, and then we're also going to look at the change in immune populations in the CSF and some biomarkers for axonal damage and chemokines that are associated with these lymphoid follicles. MSDF Are these lesions similar to ones in the brain parenchyma that come and go, or will you be sure that your treatment is what caused any difference? Dr. Bhargava So these lesions that we note on the MRI in the meninges, unlike lesions in the brain parenchyma, where you note contrast enhancement when they're new and active, and then about 4 to 8 weeks later, they stop taking up contrast, the lesions in the meninges continue to enhance for years. So there's data that these can continue to remain the same and enhance for over 3 years. So that's really why we decided to use this as a secondary endpoint, because we have not seen changes in these lesions over time. And so if we actually saw a change, it might suggest that it was secondary to our intervention. MSDF Since this is a phase I trial, do you have a control group, or you're just looking at the ones you're treating? Dr. Bhargava Yeah, so because this is a phase I trial and the primary outcome is just safety, this is open-label, and so everyone in this trial is going to receive intrathecal rituximab. MSDF When do you expect to see any results, or have you? Dr. Bhargava We will be analyzing all this data once we've accrued the patients, and we're hoping to complete recruitment in the next 3 to 4 months, and then we follow all these patients for a year. So probably at some time towards the end of next year [2016] we should have results from the trial. MSDF Is this a test of concept, not only of rituximab but of what these leptomeningeal lesions mean? Dr. Bhargava So yes and no. In a way, there's a proof of concept because if we were to see changes in these lesions that otherwise remain really stable, that might suggest that a drug that could possibly deplete B cells makes a change in these leptomeningeal lesions. But it's also possible that perhaps B cells are not a sufficient target, or that we're not able to deplete B cells that are within these structures. And so, you know, there are some confounding factors that possibly could lead to this trial not being successful. But this is what we plan to look at is, if we actually see a change in these lesions, then to us that would be a kind of a proof of concept that rituximab might be able to effect these leptomeningeal lymphoid aggregates. MSDF Is there evidence that these aggregates are pathogenic? Dr. Bhargava There is evidence in terms of previous studies where they looked in autopsies in both primary progressive and secondary progressive patients. They found that people who had evidence of meningeal follicles had more cortical demyelination compared to those who did not. So that is indirect evidence that perhaps these follicles play a role in disease progression and may be pathogenic. We don't have direct evidence yet in patients who have been, say, prospectively followed to suggest that these lesions are causing damage. MSDF Are these aggregates solely B cell, or what else is there? Dr. Bhargava You know, these aggregates have B cells, but they also have plasma cells, they have follicular helper T cells, and they have follicular dendritic cells. So there are multiple cell populations that make up these follicles, and each of these populations produce factors that keep this follicle going. And so perhaps disrupting just one component of this follicle may not be sufficient, and we may need to then expand our targets and try to target multiple cell populations at the same time. MSDF I suppose, though, if you do interrupt the sort of chain of events, it may be sufficient to break one link. Dr. Bhargava Right. That's our hope with this trial is that taking out maybe one key player in this follicle might be sufficient to then disrupt this vicious cycle, but only time will tell. MSDF Is there evidence that lymphoid aggregates may exist in the meninges in people without any evidence of any disease? Dr. Bhargava We don't know the answer for that for sure, but in the study from the NIH, they didn't really see these contrast-enhancing lesions in healthy volunteers. So that would suggest that perhaps these are not found in healthy people without disease. MSDF I'm just thinking in terms of normal brain protective mechanisms, whether things like this fight off disease. Dr. Bhargava That really would need a study looking at the meninges in people who pass away from other diseases; in, say, not autoimmune diseases. And the reason why this is such a fairly recent discovery is just because when pathologists used to look at brains at autopsy, they would just rip off the meninges and throw those away and just look at the brain. So I'm sure this question could be answered, but right now we don't know. There is actually some emerging evidence that perhaps these follicles might be seen in other CNS immune diseases, for example, Rasmussen's encephalitis. There was a study from our center where they noted presence of possible B cell follicles in biopsy material from patients with Rasmussen's encephalitis, and so it's possible that this might happen in other autoimmune disorders. But this process of ectopic lymphoid neogenesis seems to happen mostly in autoimmune diseases, like type 1 diabetes or Sjögren's syndrome or rheumatoid arthritis, and so it seems to be related to autoimmunity. MSDF If this pans out what you're doing now, would rituximab be pursued, or do you foresee other monoclonals coming along that may be more appropriate to carry forward? Dr. Bhargava I think part of that would depend on what we see in this study, and if we don't see a robust effect then we might switch to a different target. And also, you know, we may want to target more than just the B cells. You know, there are other therapies coming down the pipeline, like anti-CD19, which targets a broader range of the B cell lineage, and then perhaps we might try to target like, say, plasma cells. So I do foresee that if we continue with intrathecal therapy, we would end up trying to use other monoclonals, as well. MSDF Is this a feasible technique in many patients, a wide array, or is it very specialized and would have to be restricted? Dr. Bhargava It is not really that difficult to perform, because we basically are performing a lumbar puncture and are injecting the drug through a lumbar puncture, and so it should be feasible. Of course, it is still an invasive procedure. However, if we really did see a benefit from this, then I think it would probably be worth that effort and risk. MSDF Have we missed anything, or anything important to add on the topic? Dr. Bhargava It's important to continue to try to understand how this process is affecting the brain and whether it's actually causing damage. And I think more studies looking at perhaps imaging to see how these lesions are affecting the brain parenchyma around them may give us more insights into how pathogenic these lesions are. And then I think from our study we might begin to understand whether we're able to actually make a difference to these lesions that we're seeing. MSDF Very good, I appreciate it, thank you. Dr. Bhargava Thank you. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-Six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-four of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. People with MS take disease modifying therapies, or DMTs, for years. But is it possible to stop the drugs at some point or at least take a drug holiday? I spoke last fall at the ECTRIMS meeting in Barcelona with Dr. Ilya Kister, an assistant professor in the MS Care Center at the New York University School of Medicine. He has looked at various studies and registries that shed light on the question, and he discusses the utility and limitations of using observational data from big data sets. Interviewer – Dan Keller People know a lot about starting DMTs, but not about stopping. And, I take it, there's not much been looked at yet in terms of could you stop and what happens. Interviewee – Ilya Kister Yes, that’s a question that patients often ask, and clinicians certainly wonder about. Is it safe to stop the drug? When is it safe to stop it? And all the literature that I’ve seen on stopping the DMTs has basically analyzed the reasons for stopping them. The reasons for non-adherence—why did patient not want to continue—but there is very little data on actually what happened in terms of disease course. It’s just an observational study, you know. Do those patients continue to have relapses? Do they have more relapses or less? The only exception is natalizumab, where we have, you know, more than a dozen—probably two dozen—articles looking at what happens when you stop the drug. But that’s a little kind of almost an exceptional circumstance. There is a question of disease rebound and such. With the other drugs, very little to no data. So, so one wonders whether it’s an okay thing to do. MSDF What are the pros versus cons of stopping? Dr. Kister I think you can make almost equally appealing arguments on both sides. The arguments to continue the drugs, the main ones, are that relapses are unpredictable, and even though they’re less common as people age, we do see patients in practice, even in their 60s, who have relapses. And there was a recent study that showed that about 30% of secondary progressive MS patients have relapses. So, presumably, the drugs which work to decrease the risk of relapse would be helpful to reduce the risk of relapse even in those circumstances as well. But that’s not entirely clear, because they were never shown to be beneficial, truly, in the secondary progressive patients or in the older patients, because older patients are, by and large, excluded from all the studies. So we really don’t have any high-level data on these subpopulations. So the reasons to continue would be to try to prevent relapses, even in older patients. And the reasons to stop would be that the relapses are kind of few and far between. It may be not worth the hassle, and maybe the disadvantages of continuing in DMT long-term outweigh the theoretical risk of decreasing relapse rates. So it’s in a clinical equipoise situation, as far as I am concerned. MSDF How have you looked at this issue? Dr. Kister This is just kind of our individual practice, and many people may agree or not agree with it. This is not really based on our studies, but generally speaking, patients after age 60 who haven’t had relapses or MRI activity for at least five years, I do have a discussion with them and kind of feel them out whether they’re interested in stopping or not. And the reactions vary widely. You know, some people are very attached to their drug. They feel like it’s helping them and protecting them and has done good for them, and they don’t even want to think about stopping. And some people are very tired from being treated for many years. They don’t necessarily see the advantages of it, and they’re very willing to consider stopping and take you up on the offer. They just need a blessing to do this, because the doctor says to stop. You know, there are people in between who are kind of vacillating and not sure. But this is a population that I would consider stopping the drug. But now, about two weeks ago, we received the news that we have funding for study, wherein we’ll randomize patients. Some will continue on whatever drug they were on, and some will stop. And then this way we’ll actually collect, in a more rigorous fashion, the data of actually what happens to those patients. And that’s a study where the primary investigator is Dr. John Corboy from the University of Colorado in Denver. And there are six sites across the states that were approved for this, and where NYU is one of the six sites, and maybe a few more sites will be added. So this is our best hope, I think, to conduct, not a randomized clinical trial of starting a drug, but a randomized clinical trial of stopping a drug, which has been done in other fields, most important in oncology, a little bit in psychology, but not in neurology or in MS, as far as I know. MSDF But short of that, you've done a database study and looked at people who have stopped? Dr. Kister Yes, though that was a study that was just presented at this ECTRIMS meeting. And there we used a very large international registry called the MS Base, which has over 30,000 patients enrolled in it, so, and dozens of countries. And it's open to any investigator in the world who is interested, and he can contribute patient data. Obviously, it's patient consent, and many patients are interested in contributing their data to the registry. So because the registry is so large, we were able to include for this study almost 500 patients who met our criteria, which were fairly rigorous. We required that patients be on some drug for three years; have no relapses for at least five years, because we want to exclude active patients; and be followed for at least three years. Three years is more than most clinical trials, which are one to two years. But we really wanted to see what happened to them this time. And we excluded people who went from one DMT to another within three months. So this was the crux of this study. We looked at this—485 patients to be exact—and we followed them. And the minimum was three years, but the median was almost five years. And we found that in this population during this followup of almost five years, 36% of patients had at least one relapse. And 31% of patients had a confirmed disability progression, meaning three months apart they had a worsening of EDSS. And almost half of the patients have restarted a DMT, but not right after stopping, but two years or more after. That was the average time to restart. So that was the main kind of result. So when you talk to the patient, you try to kind of lay out the data for them, you know, this is the numbers you can use, I think. Even though somebody hasn't had relapses for five years or more, they still are at risk of relapses. And what we found was a predictor of relapses was age and EDSS. The younger patient and less disabled patients who we think are typically probably more in the relapsing phase, rather than in the secondary progressive phase, were more at risk for relapses. So for younger patients, I would be much more wary of stopping the drug, even if they have been relapse-free for years, than in an older patient. So that's one result of the study. But there was a second component of this study which was interesting, I thought, wherein we compared the people who stopped the drug with the people who continued on the drug, and we matched them. There is a technique called propensity score matching. So we matched the people who stopped and the people who stayed. And the two groups were almost identical. All the parameters, like age, disability, how long they've been on the drugs, proportion of times they've been on the drug, their gender—very, very similar according to most of the variables. And we followed them through time, and the mean followup for both groups was about five years. And we found, a little bit counterintuitively, that people who stopped the drugs did not have any more relapses than people who did not stop the drug. If you think that the drugs are protective, you will expect some effect; we didn't see any effect whatsoever. There was absolutely no effect. But interestingly enough, the people who stayed on the drug tended to progress, to show confirmed disability progression, a little less. They were at less risk of disability progression, about 40% compared to people who stopped. So it's a little hard to interpret this data. It may be that the drugs actually have some cumulative effect and maybe continue, and that does delay disability progression. That would be a very favorable interpretation as far as clinicians are concerned and the rational to continue. But it may be that people who stayed on the drug were really in some what we call unmeasured confounders. They had some reasons why they stayed, and they are not really entirely comparable to the people who stopped. Maybe they were a little more, for whatever reasons, considered to be more active by the clinician, and that's why they kept them on the drugs. So maybe there're intrinsically different groups with intrinsically different disability progression, and that is the reason for the finding. So this is where we stand right now, and this goes to show kind of the utility and the limitations of using observational data sets. The utility is that we're able to basically run that kind of a pseudo-trial, if you will, comparing the stoppers and stayers, and run it for many years. We actually have data six, seven years after stopping the drug, which is almost not possible with randomized clinical trials. And we're able to use this data. In fact, to power the clinical trial that I talked about earlier, because we can predict how many people are expected to have relapses at this age and such. And the limitation that there are known unmeasured confounders, and that there're biases in who continues to be observed and who is not, and we cannot control for that without randomization. MSDF Now, from your study, it looked like people who had been off of a DMT for more than two years had a higher relapse rate. Is there any possibility of having a drug holiday? Or, when someone comes off drug, a silent insult happens that you only see later, so you really have to not give them a holiday? Dr. Kister Well, it's a hard question to answer. They had a higher risk of disability progression, not relapses in this study. The curves begin to diverge after about two years. It was more of a long-term effect. So, you know, one wonders. But the counter argument to what you are describing is maybe there's a cumulative effect, that you really have to stay on the drug for long periods of time in order to see. And if you stop and have a holiday, you kind of wash out that possibility. So the answer is, we really don't know whether it's okay or not to give holidays. It's definitely not okay in actively relapsing patients, especially if they're on strong drugs like natalizumab or even Gilenya or even interferon. That's pretty clear. So but as far as the patients who hadn't had relapses for a long period of time, we don't know. It remains to be seen. MSDF Is there a continuing effect of any drugs, such as monoclonals, like alemtuzumab, where you might get a tail effect even after stopping it, which would essentially be your accumulative effect? Dr. Kister I think that is, you know, a very important point that we talked about stopping the drugs, but we really have to specify which drug we're stopping. Because drugs like alemtuzumab have been shown to have an effect that lasts for four years or more. And I think at this conference they will show data for even longer term effect of alemtuzumab. I've seen some posters to that effect. So those drugs have an effect on the immune system that persists. Some chemo treatments as well, you know, a stem-cell transfer. It's not something you do every year; it's something you've done once, and you see the effect that lasts for a long period of time. So I think a lot depends on the mechanisms of the drug, you know, how long they're expected to affect the immune system for. Something like natalizumab that washes out within three months or so, and you don't really see, you know, effect on the receptor level than you'll be after about three or four months. We don't really…you wouldn't expect it to work beyond that time, and it really doesn't. It only lasts that long. And other drugs, there is a sustained loss of T cells and B cells for a long period of time, and perhaps that's why there's a clinical effect that lasts for many years. MSDF Have we missed anything? Or is there anything important or interesting to add on the topic? Dr. Kister I think your interest was in observational data sets, and I think MS Base registry and others, like NARCOMS registry, they show the power of, kind of all of the people power. It's not the big pharma who is collecting the data, which is very important and has a big role, obviously. It's actual clinicians and actual patients who volunteer their data. And I think patients should be gratified to see that their data is used to actually come up with some insight as to advantage them, come back to the patients and answer some of the questions they had. So I think those databases are very important. MSDF I appreciate it. Thank you. Dr. Kister Thank you very much. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-four of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

Full Transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Many MS patients will require a change of drug therapy over the course of their disease, possibly because of relapse or tolerability. At last fall's ECTRIMS conference in Barcelona, I spoke with Eva Havrdová MD PhD, professor of neurology and head of the MS Center at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, about when and how to change therapy. I first asked her how she detects a need to change therapy because of a suboptimal response. Interviewee – Eva Havrdová It's very difficult to find the right solution for each patient, but as to our opinion, the best thing is to really start early treatment and monitor closely the patient. It means that you look not only at relapses or progression. It's too late. We also look at MRI after six months after starting treatment. And I think it is now quite proven that, if the patient has either relapse or new MRI activity, the response in the first year is suboptimal and the treatment should be already changed. Interviewer – Dan Keller So you have a very high suspicion? Dr. Havrdová Yes, definitely very high suspicion. And you can add some quality of life measures. You can add cognitive measures. You can ask the patient, what’s the level of fatigue. And of course, all this together brings you to the solution to change the treatment. MSDF Do you generally find that you will pick something sooner on MRI then by patient report? Dr. Havrdová Yes, of course, because the events on MRI occur 10 times more frequently. But on the other hand, as to regulations for reimbursement, I cannot change the treatment just based on MRI in our country. So definitely in the future, this will be an option. But we need more data to prove to the sick fund that it's really worth doing it because if you do these changes and find optimal treatment for patients early, then the patient stays at work, and of course, the cost effectiveness of the drugs increases. MSDF I suppose that depends on having a unified system, which is not built into silos. You know, when you get one payer here and one payer there; they don't care what's coming out of the other guy's pocket. Dr. Havrdová Yeah, yeah, of course. It's very difficult; and therefore, I think we need guidelines. And one of the ECTRIMS activities is to start working on some guidelines, and I hope next year we will have it. MSDF So what do you do when you find something that would raise your suspicion or prompt you to do something different? Dr. Havrdová We monitor the patient even more closely, in three-month intervals. And very often we see that the patient develops a relapse after some MRI activity occurs. So we can change the treatment. MSDF Do you often escalate the present drug? Or switch drugs immediately? Dr. Havrdová We have to start with injectables in our country, not with oral drugs, which is the mainstream now in other countries. And we hope we will also push our authorities to this strand because patients, of course, want orals. On the other hand, the safety of injectables is well-proven for more than 20 years. So for those especially who want to get pregnant, the safety is number one. And we try to switch as early as possible, because if another relapse comes, the relapse may be disabling, and we are just losing time in the brain of the patient. And as you know, here at ECTRIMS, the one day before, the health of brain was promoted in MS. And we would like to stick to this idea. MSDF So it sounds like you change drugs, not escalate the present drug? Dr. Havrdová The escalation means the change as well. So we try not to switch within the first line, but we want to see more effect. Just because of intolerability or some known adherence of patient on injectables, we can switch within the line if there is no activity of the disease itself. Or if there are neutralizing antibodies on interferon, we can switch to Copaxone. But on the other hand, it was now published, based on data in MS base, which is a big registry of real world data, that it's really worth escalating to the higher efficacy drugs because you can reach much better effect. MSDF Over the years, do most patients require some change? Dr. Havrdová Most of them do, though there are patients who are completely stable and not developing higher EDSS steps on injectables, but it's less than 25% of them. MSDF Is there any way to generalize and say what the time course is? Or is it so variable? Dr. Havrdová No, it's very variable. And we do not know if it is based just on genes or on environment or lifestyle changes the patient is willing to undertake. We do not know yet. MSDF So I don't know if you can generalize because each country is different, but do you have some scheme or algorithm in mind about how you would escalate therapy? Dr. Havrdová The problem is if the patient is not responding to the second line or higher efficacy therapy, because we then have to switch within that line. And we do not know if he doesn't respond to anything we have. We do not know what to do. So we cannot switch or jump from one treatment to the other after six months of treatment, because you have to allow the treatment to have an effect. So at least six or nine months is okay. If the patient is not responding, then you can jump to other treatment. But hopefully the patient will respond to the third or fourth treatment, because it's not without limitations. MSDF Is combination therapy every indicated? Dr. Havrdová Not yet. I have thought many years ago that neurologists are just reluctant to use combination therapies, but now there were some trials, and it's not showing that effect. So it's not like in oncology. Though the principle is so clear, that you can combine drugs with various mechanisms of action decrease, some side effects, and increase the efficacy. Oncologists do that. We don't have drugs in the multiple sclerosis with this potential yet. MSDF Right. In hypertension they've just assumed they're always going to have two or three drugs, and same thing now with diabetes and things like that. But I guess this would be a big conceptual breakthrough for neurologists? Dr. Havrdová Yeah, and doesn't seem to be today's issue. MSDF What has been tried in combination? Dr. Havrdová The first combination which was tried was natalizumab and interferon. And it seems that it didn't work. And then, of course, it was also a small trial, natalizumab plus glatiramer acetate, and nothing just to safety was, of course, seen that. And some others, but nothing really. MSDF When there's an acute exacerbation, do you overlap steroids with the ongoing drug? Dr. Havrdová Yes, of course. Yes. It was proven that it's safe, and it's okay. MSDF So there is a combination, but short-term? Dr. Havrdová Yeah, it's a short-term combination. And definitely it helps because all the underlying immunomodulating drugs do not work against the acute relapse. MSDF What have we missed or is important to add on the topic? Dr. Havrdová I think that neurologists have to be aware, and of course, pharmacovigilent. You have to know the mechanism of action of the drug; you have to know the adverse events possible and how to prevent them—how to monitor the patient to be safe. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.  

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eight-two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Depression affects as many as 50 percent of people with MS during their lifetimes. But according to Dr. Adam Kaplin, a psychiatrist in the Johns Hopkins MS Center in Baltimore, it is treatable to a large extent, and with good results. Dr. Kaplin studies the immune basis of depression and cognitive impairment, specifically in MS and central nervous system-related autoimmune diseases. We met in Baltimore. Interviewer – Dan Keller Let’s talk about depression in multiple sclerosis. Is it a reaction to someone having a chronic disease, or is there something more going on because of the disease? Interviewee – Adam Kaplin It’s a great question, and what I will tell you is one of my patients says to me that you’re either stressed, or you’re dead. We all have stress going on, and it’s always possible to look at something in our life and say, ah, that’s what caused the trouble. But we know now, in multiple sclerosis, the depression is due primarily and dramatically significantly to the inflammation going on in the brain that causes all of the symptoms that you see in MS, such as cognitive impairment, or weakness/numbness/tingling, autonomic nervous system dysfunction; all of those are effects of the MS on the CNS. And in the case of depression, it is similar. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not a personal weakness. And just to, you know, clarify, one of the best pieces of evidence we have for that is, number 1, that people who are depressed with MS, it does not correlate with their EDSS scores. It doesn’t correlate with their level of disabilities. So if it was you know, gee, it’s just a matter of stress, then those people who are in wheel chairs or on ventilators should be depressed, and those people who are upright and walking around shouldn’t. But in fact, I think the key element is that this is one of the, as they often say, silent symptoms of MS. It occurs to 50% of patients across their lifetime. And it is important you know for people to understand that this is not something that people aren’t rising to the occasion, or those kinds of things. MSDF Is depression accompanying MS more prevalent than in the general population, and how serious is it? Dr. Kaplin You know people often ask why, as a neuropsychiatrist, why study MS? And I say, you know, why did Willie Sutton rob banks? That’s where the money is. MS has the highest rate of clinical depression of any medical neurological or surgical disease. Again, 50% of people, following the diagnosis of MS, will have a clinical depression. We can talk about what that is. And it turns out that that’s in any clinic you go into – neurology clinic – that’s one in four patients. If you go out to the waiting room, one in four patients will be suffering from a clinical depression. MSDF How serious a problem is it? What aspects of life does it affect? Does it affect everything, and how serious is it? Dr. Kaplin I think what is often misunderstood about the depression in MS is, I would argue, that it has the highest morbidity and mortality of any of the symptoms of MS, in the sense that it is the third leading cause of death in the largest study that looked at, across the lifespan, what causes death in people with MS, [found] a study out of Canada, where it’s more prevalent because of the higher elevation and the lower vitamin D levels, probably. And it is absolutely the case that seven-and-a-half times the rate – the suicide rate in MS – to the general population. And in fact, in the studies that were done, 30% of people with multiple sclerosis will have thoughts of suicide at some point during their life. Ten percent – fully 10% will attempt suicide. And that lethality is profound. But if it doesn’t kill you, it is important to understand that it has significant, significant morbidity associated with it. Just to begin with, the number one correlate of quality of life of patients—more important than their pain, or more important than their cognitive impairment, or weakness, or other symptoms—the number one correlate of the quality of life of the patient is their depression or whether they are depressed or not. And it’s similarly the number one quality of life of the care givers—not whether they have to push them around in a wheelchair, it is whether their loved one is suffering from a clinical depression. So it has significant morbidity and mortality associated with it. MSDF Are there aspects of serious depression in MS that are very characteristic? Any different from other severe depression? Or can it be recognized in the same way with the same diagnostic criteria? Dr. Kaplin There actually are some specifics to MS, although that hasn’t been well-published. I can be clear about things that are well-supported by the literature, and then those that are my clinical experiences. What I can tell you is that the way we diagnose depression in MS is the same way we diagnose depression in people without MS, which is you have to have 5 of 9 symptoms greater than two weeks, one of which must be either decreased mood or decreased interest. And we remember it by SIG-EM-CAPS, the nine symptoms. Trouble with sleep, where people are often having early morning awakenings or hypersomnia where they just sleep all day. Loss of interest, people’s get up and go has gotten up and gone. Feelings of guilt or worthlessness – and that’s a big problem, because patients who are depressed as a result of that often won’t seek help. You have to ask about it. They won’t volunteer it. And loss of energy or fatigue; low mood – that’s the sadness part; concentration problem; appetite changes, either increased or decreased weight; and psychomotor retardation, they’re not their normal bubbly self; and thoughts of death or suicide. With MS, what I will tell you, I find that patients with MS often, rather than sadness, have very frequently irritability. That tends to be more common. And sleep is usually decreased, not increased, so I see very frequently increased early morning awakening and those kinds of things. One pearl, though, to keep in mind is – or two pearls – if you’re trying to make the diagnosis of depression in somebody with MS, the first thing to do, because there are overlapped symptoms like fatigue, like concentration problems between depression and MS, so there is frequently, in up to 80% of people, will have diurnal variations in their moods; so usually worst in the morning and better at night. Sometimes it’s reversed, but you know that person has the same life circumstance, the same disease circumstance in the evening that they did in the morning, but their mood has changed dramatically, often, with MS with these cyclical changes. And that’s a good indication that it’s not demoralization; it’s depression. The other thing is ask the loved one. Get an outside informant, because nobody gets the brunt of it quite like the family. And they know that person, and if the family member says the one thing I hear so often, this is not the person I married, then you’re pretty much on the right track if you’re thinking about depression. MSDF How amenable to treatment is depression in MS? Dr. Kaplin I think that that is probably one of the key aspects is to understand that it is very treatable. So my expectation when patients come to me and I diagnose them with depression is that I will get them a hundred percent well with respect to those SIG-EM-CAPS symptoms, back to their baseline. And it’s very hard to get patients a hundred percent well from their gait problems; a hundred percent well from their cognitive problems. And, again, what I tell people is, look, I can’t tell you whether your cognitive impairment is due to the depression or due to the MS, or maybe it’s 10% depression/90% MS or 90% depression/10% MS. But I can promise you this: treating the depression, the depression is much more amenable to treatment. We don’t have good treatments for cognitive impairment in MS to reverse the cognitive impairment, but boy, we can reverse it if it’s a symptom of depression. What’s really exciting now is that we are now understanding more and more that many of the treatments you use for depression end up being good nerve tonics. So, there was a double-blind placebo-controlled study of fluoxetine demonstrating that, in patients who weren’t depressed with MS, they had fewer gadolinium-enhancing lesions over 24 weeks. And then there was the FLAME study in a related kind of way looking at fluoxetine as a way of significantly enhancing the recovery of hemiplegic stroke patients. So it turns out that I wasn’t so misguided in thinking that studying the immune basis of depression would be important, because as it turns out, our treatments actually do have an effect on the nervous system and the immune system for general types of depression as well. MSDF That sort of covers the SSRI class. What about tricyclic antidepressants? What about SNRIs? Do those fit in? Dr. Kaplin Yes, so absolutely. So the topic of how to choose and select the right treatment for patients with MS is … we could spend an hour and just sort of get only the highlights done there. But generally there’re sort of two strategies. One is to use a medication that has the fewest side effects, so that you won’t have drug-drug interactions with the patient if they’re on a numerous medicines for other concerns—their other symptoms and syndromes—that the antidepressant won’t interfere with it. And so along those lines, escitalopram and sertraline have the fewest drug-drug interactions. You essentially don’t need to look up drug-drug interactions if your patient is on one of those two medicines. The other approach is to say let’s choose a medicine that will have favorability with respect to the side effects, will be beneficial for the problems that the patient has. So a classic example is duloxetine is FDA-approved, not just for depression, not just for anxiety, but also for neuropathic and musculoskeletal pain. So here you’re talking about one treatment that will help you with the fact that your patient, their depression will get better; their neuropathic pain will get better if they have migraines—which are often a comorbidity—that will also benefit the neuropathic pain from that as well. And you know you will get two birds with one stone, as it were. And then the tricyclics, as you had asked about, we’ve had a lot of experience with them. They also will benefit in terms of the urinary incontinence problem. They are strongly anticholinergic, and so you can also benefit in terms of preventing the urinary/bowel problems. So really Cymbalta as just sort of son-of-tricyclics, has some fewer side effects, but doesn’t, therefore, cover some of the things that the tricyclics will. MSDF As you alluded to earlier, the depression in MS may largely be a result of immune processes going on—inflammation, cytokines, things like that. So how well do the disease-modifying therapies of MS attack the depression? Dr. Kaplin You know you mentioned cytokines. So that is another way that we know that this is due to the inflammation—the depression in MS—and not just other things, because for instance, interferon-alpha used to treat patients with hepatitis C will cause depression in upwards of 20 to 25% of people who take it, not when they first start it, but within you know a week to two weeks after starting it, you know, then up to eight weeks. So that’s just one cytokine, and in MS, all of the cytokines get activated. And similarly, interferon-beta that’s used, or Copaxone, you know, the ABCR drugs that we’ve used to try to—you know, with great effect since 1993—to slow the exacerbations down in MS; they don’t stop the inflammation, they just alter it. And so not surprisingly, they do not have antidepressant properties. But when you look at something like Tysabri, we actually have not published this yet. We did present it at a MS conference but working in collaboration with Biogen. We are going to publish shortly data that shows that, in a double-blind placebo-controlled study of adding natalizumab to Avonex, or adding placebo to Avonex, those patients who were depressed to begin with show a dramatic and statistically significantly decrease in their depression as a result of the natalizumab. So natalizumab is actually quite a good antidepressant—we have data for it—because that really does shut the inflammation down in the brain, and since that’s causing the depression in MS, that’s what benefits them. MSDF Just to clarify, natalizumab is a good antidepressant in MS. Dr. Kaplin Exactly right. That’s exactly right. Although, you know, it’s good that you clarified that. What’s interesting is that now that people are beginning to appreciate the role of the immune system in idiopathic depression, people are beginning to say, hmm, maybe we should be looking at these anti-inflammatories and seeing if the anti-inflammatories benefit patients with depression. Now, nobody has tried natalizumab, but TNF-alpha inhibitors have actually been tried. There was a study out of Emory looking at using TNF-alpha inhibitors for refractory depression. And I think coming down the road there will be more and more studies that begin to show the role of anti-inflammatories for not all, but some people with refractory depression. MSDF Yes, I’ve seen some studies on anti-inflammatories—traditional ones, NSAIDS sort of things—presented a German study at a neurology conference. Didn’t do too much. Dr. Kaplin Yes. What I can tell you is that not all NSAIDs are created equal. Celecoxib actually now has five studies that are placebo-controlled that have shown its benefit for depression or bipolar disorder. And so when added to antidepressant by itself: No. But when added to fluoxetine or—I can’t remember what other; it might have been sertraline—it clearly had a statistically significant improvement in the depression response, celecoxib. But not all NSAIDs are created the same. MSDF What about non-drug therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy, even just physical activity? And, if someone’s depressed, isn’t it hard to get them up and do physical activity? Dr. Kaplin Well, I’m so glad brought that up, because I’d be remiss to forget that. So all of the data says, look, therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy are effective for mild and moderate depression. Antidepressants are effective as well. The data shows that the antidepressants work quicker, but that the combination of antidepressants and psychotherapy is much better than either one alone. So that’s a crucial issue. And to make sense of what has happened—and often when people are depressed, they’ve been depressed, and that’s caused damage to their professional life and personal life, and having someone help them sort of, depending how long the depression’s been going on, sort of talk them through, coach them through, how to get back up and going. However, in severe depression, you can talk till the cows come home. If your patient is so depressed that basically they have this tunnel vision, and all of the options that are in front of them, the kind of mental flexibility that you need for CBT to work, for instance, it will not work if you patient is really severely depressed. You have to get them started with the antidepressant, which really then serves as a catalyst for the psychotherapy to kick in. And then the aspect of exercise, you can’t really pick a topic related to MS where the answer isn’t exercise. Cognitive impairment, absolutely exercise is beneficial. Depression, exercise is beneficial. It stimulates growth hormones that have positive neurological effects on the CNS, as well as on the peripheral nervous system and body. What I tell people, again, is that if your patient is severely depressed, they’re not going just go back out and start running. So you’ve got to begin to have a plan where you say, look, we’re going to begin this medicine. As you start to be able to have the ability to you know maybe push yourself more than you might usually and just sort of walk down the block, and then you know walk for a mile and then start jogging for a mile and sort of build up to it, that’s very beneficial. MSDF Are there barriers to recognizing and/or treating depression both on the patient’s side and on the physician’s side? Dr. Kaplin The big barrier on the physician’s side is, you know, don’t ask, don’t tell. So if you don’t think of depression, or worse, if the neurologist says, well, I went into neurology not psychiatry, you know, this whole depression thing, that’s not my bailiwick, that’s not my responsibility, you’re missing the fact that this is —first of all, this is very rewarding. There’s nothing else that you could treat that gets a patient from being non-functional, sitting at home, not taking care of the family, not working, in a bed to fully functional, taking care of the family, back at work, like treating the depression can. But also it is. It affects all aspects. It affects the patient’s compliance with all your other medicines. It affects their ability to exercise, etc., etc. So, you know, you’ve got to think of it. And then you have to know something about treating it. One of the big problems with neurologists when they treat depression is that they don’t appreciate the fact that the goal is to get that patient a hundred percent well, because you sort of have this sigma curve where, if you get them 50% well, they’re still in that sort of steep portion of the curve where something comes along—an MS attack or you even a viral infection—and they will slip right down that curve. Whereas, if you can push them way out into the hundred percent well, that’s great. Now you can’t always do it with one medicine. You take the dose as high as the patient can tolerate, where the side effects don’t become worse than the depression you’re trying to treat. But then you might need to add another medicine, an augmenting agent or something, so you’ve got to make sure you recognize it and treat it. And then, what I always tell my colleagues—and my colleagues at Hopkins are wonderful; they do appreciate you know you’re treating the whole patient, not just you know their reflex arcs and that kind of stuff—and what they are very good at is, if the patient is depressed and suicidal, that is the psychiatric equivalent of a heart attack. So then they will get in touch with me and we’ll work together. So if you’ve got someone who’s suicidal, you really want to get in touch. Unless you have the utmost experience and confidence in treating the worst cases of depression, you probably want to get a psychiatrist involved, or mental health professional involved, to help coordinate the care for someone like them. MSDF Very good! I appreciate it. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. For years, MS researchers have been looking for a measure of MS progression and disability that would be meaningful to clinicians, clinical researchers, patients, and the regulatory agencies that approve new drugs, such as the Food and Drug Administration. To this end, people have looked to composite endpoints that are sensitive to small changes in patient condition and comparable across studies. At the ECTRIMS conference last fall in Barcelona, I met with Dr. Jerry Wolinsky, professor of neurology and director of the MS Research Group at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, who leads us along the path to develop a useful measure incorporating composite endpoints. Interviewer – Dan Keller In terms of assessing progression and disability in MS, is there some advantage to having composite endpoints as opposed to the standard tests we’ve looked at? Interviewee – Jerry Wolinsky There are several different ways to think about composite endpoints. So one of the things that was introduced almost several decades ago was MSFC functional composite. So this was using three different ways of looking at different components of disability in patients with MS. One was a test of cognition. One was a test of fine motor skills in the upper extremities. And one was a test of walking abilities/walking speed. That particular composite looked very attractive. There was a fair amount of theoretical and practical work behind instituting the composite, and it was used in a number of trials. And it was based on some very important, I think, kind of statistical analysis. So what it allowed one to do was to take patients either in a given study or across studies and try to normalize the data that you would get from those patients into something called a z-score, which is a way of ranking and evaluating how far across the group of patients people were scattered. And then one could conceptually add up the z-scores and have a composite number, and a single number that you could use to analyze trial data. It seemed to be rather sensitive, and it seemed to work well. But the z-score is very dimensionless, and it makes little sense to the practicing clinician, or certainly to patients, to know that you’re minus-two or minus-five or plus-two, and that maybe this has moved by two-hundredths of a point from the time you started in the study until you got to the end of the study. So, highly sensitive, seemed very reproducible, maybe even a way to look across studies at different results, but neither patients or physicians and, most importantly, the FDA thought that this would be useful in day-to-day practice. So, while we’ve tested that kind of approach in multiple studies, it just hasn’t worked. But it did set up the notion that we could get a little bit more quantitative in things that could be useful on a daily basis, even using some of the same components of that MSFC. So instead of thinking about how fast could one person walk compared to another, we said, how fast can a person walk using a timed walk of a fixed distance and at one point in time? And then say how much change over an interval of time would represent something that was likely to be reproducible and, more importantly, likely to be correlated with some measure of quality of life that also was deteriorating? So then we got to the notion–and this was really best utilized thus far in the trials of 4-aminopyridine in terms of registration studies there–to say could you show a 20% improvement or more in this timed walk over an interval of time? And in that study, a certain number of patients were able to show it, and there was also some correlative data done to show that that amount of improvement correlated with things which were meaningful to the individual. And so I think that helped facilitate getting that drug through the registration process with the FDA. One of the things that my colleagues and I did in looking at one of the trials in progressive disease, specifically the trial of rituximab in primary progressive MS, where we had the data that goes into the MSFC, because it had been collected in the study, was to try to develop a number of different composites. And actually, when you think about it, the main score that we use to rate studies is the EDSS score, and it itself is a composite. It takes into account graded changes in fine motor skills in what we would call the cerebellar system, in the pyramidal system, in the sensory systems, and cognitive systems. It’s just that the boundaries in moving in these individual functional scales are a little bit more subjective in terms of going from a zero to a one, two, or three. And then the scale itself is rather complicated in terms of how it put together to come to the final score, the extended disability status score. But it’s very well accepted by neurologists, and it’s accepted by the regulatory authorities as the standard. So we took our standard changes on EDSS, which in this particular study had not shown efficacy across the group as a whole. So we looked at that in the placebo arm, and didn’t contaminate that with the treated arm, to say what was the rate of change on the EDSS alone? But then we also said, what about a 20% change over baseline that had occurred in an individual patient over intervals of testing and not just one that occurred at a particular setting compared to baseline, but one that continued to be seen at the next 3 months and the next 3 months. So it looked like it was a sustained change in the same way that we use EDSS now in trials to talk about sustained or accumulated permanent disability, at least over some interval of time. So we said, okay, we can construct a progression curve based on that. And then we said, what does that look like? And said, well, this has some dimensions to it that are interesting. And we did the same thing with the Timed 25-Foot Walk, and we didn’t fool around with the PASAT [Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test] the cognitive measure because nobody likes it. Patients don’t appreciate it, and it’s a rather prolonged and not a simple test to use. And this is one that probably could be easily changed out with other cognitive tests that are probably as reliable and easier to complete. And we looked at how did patients progress using that change in the timed walk and said, well, that’s interesting too. And then we went into the group as a whole and said, okay, how many patients changed on the EDSS over three months, confirmed? How many over six months, confirmed? How many did this on the Timed 25-Foot Walk? Did it cross the 20% threshold? How many did this on the 9-Hole Peg Test and, again, crossing the 20% threshold? And who were these patients, more importantly? So then we could develop series of Venn diagrams–if you will, circles–that showed who did it on just one test, who did it on all tests, who did it on two tests? And looked to see could we get a larger and larger proportion of the population that were showing progression? And the answer is: We could. And for some tests, the incremental change was small, and for other tests the incremental change was relatively large. But when we looked at the results of the study, then, using different kinds of composites, you fail just on EDSS; you fail on EDSS, or you fail on Timed 25-Foot Walk; you fail on Timed 25-Foot Walk or 9-Hole Peg Test—we don’t care about EDSS in that one—you fail on all three. We could see that we could increase the sensitivity, that is, the number of people who were showing progression, using these kinds of composites, and hoped, therefore, that we could increase the sensitivity to drug effect. So then we did the next step, which was to take both the placebo arm and the treated arms and say, okay, how did the curves change? So the overall curve showed no statistical benefit with the EDSS, until you went to subgroup analysis. And that was reported in the original paper. But when we modeled this, of course, the overall didn’t show the statistical effect. That’s where we were starting from. When we added in the Timed 25-Foot Walk, it looked like there was a better split. In fact, the effect size for the treatment improved. And this was not across subgroups, but across the entire population. Interestingly enough, we probably got the biggest punch by throwing out the EDSS and just using the 9-Hole Peg Test and the Timed 25-Foot Walk. That has some advantages, because they can be done by anyone. In fact, they probably could be done remotely, or we probably could convert it to how many steps a day did you take and have your watch feed the message to us over the course of a day. There are a number of interesting different approaches that can be taken to this kind of concept, and some of these are being pursued by a collaborative group spearheaded through the NIH, as well as a private consortium, looking at newer ways to measure progression. The good news is, I’m sure we’ll find things that are more sensitive. The good news is, I’m sure we’ll find things that are easier to apply. Another part of the good news is that the additional work increasingly is carried out with some representatives from the regulatory authorities to give us a feeling for what they really want to see. And what they would like to see is not just that we have composites that are sensitive and reproducible, but each of those composites that, before using them, has been shown to have some relevance for what patients complain of and what patients are looking for. So that’s the good news. The bad news is we have to not only develop them, validate them, show that they work, we’ll probably have to constantly be comparing them back, in our future trials, to the standard, until we get our first drug that really works in these new, validated approaches that are being taken. MSDF Do you think that different drugs will show you different effects on different parameters within the composite score, or do things pretty much move in synchrony? Dr. Wolinsky You know, because multiple sclerosis is such a heterogeneous disease—heterogeneous in many ways, but the simplest one to think about is the lesions don’t exactly form in a way that suits us as trialists. So, many of the lesions are silent for whatever it is we’re trying to test, no matter how carefully we test for them except maybe with really high resolution MRI. So it depends where in the real estate the lesion has hit. So it’s easy to imagine that a relatively small lesion in the cerebellum particularly well-situated could cause some slowing of the ability to do the 9-Hole Peg Test, and yet it might take a very large lesion in the frontal lobe to do the same effect in that system. In the same way, it may take just a small lesion in a pyramidal pathway, either in the spinal cord or in the internal capsule, to cause a significant change in the 25-Foot Walk and do nothing in the 9-Hole Peg Test. So, conceptually, we want to be able separately test—or relatively separately; the brain is fairly interconnected—separately test as many systems as we can and build upon them. Usually with these composites, you don’t lose too much by adding composites, as long as they’re truly independent of each other. As they become more interdependent, then the more you add, you may lose some of your ability to find small changes statistically. They’ll cancel out. MSDF Even though these are composites, you’re still interested in the separate parameters? I mean, it looks like one parameter could offset another, and your composite score could be neutral, even though you have larger changes in the separate parameters. Dr. Wolinsky What you’re trying to do, if you’re setting up your composites correctly, is not to have them cancel. And with the z-score we talked about before, it can cancel. With a composite, where you’re expecting each of the scales to be moving in a particular ordinal fashion that is going from better to worse, you don’t care where the worst comes from, if you’re saying we’ll take worse in any system. Where it gets tricky is, once you get good at that, then you might want to say, well, you get two points for getting worse in the walking system, because that’s more correlated with whether or not someone’s employable than it is if it’s in, let’s say, bladder measures, which we don’t have quantitatively—well, we do, but they’re just harder to apply—or perhaps on using other visual pathway measures that have yet to be introduced into the composites very well. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-nine of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Wouldn't it be great to be able to predict who will develop MS? Then those people could be followed prospectively, possibly medication could eventually avert the disease, and at least some medical planning could be done early. Immunologist Dr. Nancy Monson, an associate professor in the department of neurology and neurotherapeutics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, has developed a promising diagnostic test for relapsing-remitting MS that looks at unique antibody gene mutation signatures in B cells in cerebrospinal fluid. Interviewee – Nancy Monson We can identify with 86-92% accuracy patients who either have MS or will develop MS in the future. Interviewer – Dan Keller How long is the future? Dr. Monson So the longest patient we've tracked so far is 17 months out. MSDF And how quickly might this turn into MS? Dr. Monson As soon as immediate. It kind of depends on, you know, what the patient's history has been really in that respect. MSDF This is tested so far on a pretty small cohort, is that right? Dr. Monson No, we tested it on three different smaller cohorts here at UT Southwestern. And then when DioGenix licensed the IP on MS PreCISe, they actually took it to clinical trials, and we're writing that workup now. And that was 300 patients in that trial. MSDF It looks like there's very good sensitivity, but what's the specificity in terms of other kinds of neurological diseases, inflammatory diseases, anything else? Dr. Monson Right. So we're just starting to figure that out. So the accuracy is based on comparing true patients who convert or evolve to MS versus patients who do not. That's where the accuracy mathematics comes from. But in that respect, the control patients that we've looked at so far, the majority of them have very low scores to no score detectable at all in those patients. But some of them do have higher scores. And we don't understand that yet, because we don't really understand any CNS disease for that matter and how the immune system is operating in there. But we're working on trying to expand the control cohorts that we can really kind of nail down, you know, which ones they'll be different from and which ones they won't be different from. MSDF Is it worth doing healthy controls also? Dr. Monson Not really. Healthy controls are always really low, and so I don't think that's a very fair comparer because it's just not very stringent, right? It's not very hard to be able to figure out who are the healthy donors with MS PreCISe. But when you start looking at people that mimic MS, like people with sarcoidosis and people with neuromyelitis optica, you know, then, you start to really have a rigorous ability to test MS PreCISe. And it's quite possible, when we start expanding those kind of control cohorts, the mimics of MS, that the MS PreCISe scoring mechanism will have to be adjusted to kind of push those different control groups away from the MS group and distinguish the two better. MSDF When we talk about these gene mutation signatures, what are you really looking at? Or for? Dr. Monson So if you think about B cells in the blood, they produce antibodies, which are designed to survey the entire body for infection. Okay? So the way that they do that is to have a really great ability to bind to infectious agents or foreign agents in your body. So the mechanism that a B cell uses to do that is called somatic hypermutation or affinity maturation. And what that means is just fancy immunology speak for saying that they incorporate mutations into their antibody genes in order to bind to their targets better, okay? So it makes them more effective in being able to find them and to stick to them. So we've done an initial look at the different antibody genes that were being used by MS patients versus our control cohorts, and didn't really see that the genes themselves were that different that they were using. So then we thought, well, maybe it's the somatic hypermutations that they're putting into those genes that are really different from what we see in the controls, and that's what turned out to be true. So it turns out that there is a family of antibody genes that incorporate these somatic hypermutations allowing them to bind to their target better that we don't see in healthy people or people with other neurological diseases. In fact, in some cases some of these codons will accumulate mutations up to seven times more than what we see in control cohorts. And that's what MS PreCISe is based on, is the accumulation of those mutations into those six codons. So the more mutations there are in those six codons, the higher the MS PreCISe score you get, and the more likely it is that you actually have MS. MSDF Are you essentially losing tolerance here, because of the hypermutation there's more chance that you're going to start to recognize self-antigens? Dr. Monson So we have actually taken the antibodies that have these somatic hypermutations in those six codons and looked to see if they bind to human brain tissue. And it turns out that they absolutely do, hands down. We've tested 38 of those so far, and 90% of them bind to neurons in the brain. So we know they bind to self-antigens, right? But that doesn't necessarily mean that they've lost tolerance or that they're proinflammatory, for example. It's possible that the B cells that are making these antibodies are actually somehow able to quiet the immune system. We don't know yet because we haven't been able to do those experiments to see. But obviously, when you see a lot of B cells that are reactive to the brain, right, that they're antibodies are reacted to the brain, that is an alarm to us that they have probably overstepped their boundaries, have not gone to school correctly and done what they're supposed to do. But we still have some experiments to do to make sure that that's what's going on with it. MSDF I suppose that leads to a question of, are they pathogenic in themselves? Or are they bystanders or regulatory somehow else? Dr. Monson Right. That's a really good question, and we don't know the answer to that. There're some experiments we can do to start testing that, but it's very tricky to do those experiments, particularly in the mouse models we have right now. We're not going to give these antibodies to people and see if they get MS, right? So you have to do all that testing in animals or in vitro. And because no one prior to this time has ever actually been able to demonstrate that antibodies from B cells of any type in MS patients actually bind to brain tissue, I mean, this is completely undiscovered country. We're kind of out there on our own trying to figure out how to best ask those questions, and it's a little bit tricky. But I'm fortunate to have a lot of really brilliant people that work with me, and so we'll work on trying to figure out how we can test that in the best way. MSDF It seems that people have been looking for years for the antigen or antigens that are being reacted against in MS. Can you isolate anything and try to stimulate these B cells to nail down what the antigen might be? Or because they're so hypermutable, they might react to anything and then expand on their own anyway? Dr. Monson Well, we know that they don't recognize all targets, right? So we just published a paper in November of this past year, actually it was October when it came out online. But what that shows is that these MS PreCISe-based antibodies bind to neurons and astrocytes in the gray matter of the human brain. And they don't bind to other tissues. They don't bind to other cell type. They are really fairly specific to neurons and glia in the brain. So we know that part of it already. But the question is, you know, what are they doing there? And is it just an epiphenomenon (is what they call it, right)? Is it just a bystander effect that we're even able to find them? So we just don't know the answers to those questions yet. But all those are good possibilities. MSDF Does this depend on the natural propensity of the immune system to create a lot of diversity, generate diversity, because it seems like what you're talking about are all replacement or substitution mutations within these codon hot spots? If you had a deletion or frame shift or something else, you wouldn't see it, because they're not even functional, I assume? Dr. Monson Right. That's exactly right. You got that right. MSDF Is there any value in combining MRI with the antibody gene signatures for a higher predictive power? Dr. Monson So let me be very clear. This test is not meant to replace MRI. MRI is a gold standard in the field. It is essential for physicians to be able to understand the disease and to come up with a plan for how to treat those patients. This is just meant to be a very powerful, supportive, preclinical diagnostic tool to help them base their decisions appropriately. So that's what we're mostly excited about. So, yeah, absolutely. Combined with MRI, I think it'll do an even better job. We actually in the clinical trial we just finished, it's not published yet, what we showed was that when you combine MS PreCISe with oligoclonal banding, the OCB test, that actually you can boost the accuracy of MS PreCISe up to 96% when you combine it with OCB. So that tells us, also, at a scientific level that not only are the genetics of the antibodies important to drive disease, but also that the antibodies probably plays a role in their conversion to MS as well. MSDF Based on the efficacy of rituximab that's been shown, and what you've been finding, is there any thought to doing something more permanent, like using CAR T cells to eliminate B cells almost permanently? Dr. Monson So as a B cell biologist, it's really somewhat offensive to think that we are going to get rid of B cells in all these people, and they're going to be able to be okay with that. We rely a lot on B cells differentiating into plasma cells and living in the bone marrow and making antibodies against things that we see all the time. But when we start depleting B cells from people long-term, it's possible that their humoral immunity, which is composed partly of the B cells and their antibody products, will not be able to fight newer infections because, you know, there's no new B cells to learn about those new infections. So no, I don't think it's a wise decision that we continue to use rituximab and ocrelizumab. I think that they are the next step. They're a transitional stage that we need before we can get to the true gold standard, which would be a way to deplete just the B cells that are involved in pathogenesis of the disease. My stump on that would be that we should be making B cell depleting antibodies that only recognize those B cells that carry the MS PreCISe antibodies, and those are the B cells we should be getting rid of. But we have a lot of work to do to be able to show that they really are the ones that drive evolution to MS. MSDF What is MS PreCISe? Is this a commercial test now? Dr. Monson So MS PreCISe is its commercial name, but it has not been rolled out yet. It's just beginning into a CLIA lab right now. So hopefully within the next year, it will be an orderable test. MSDF One thing I noticed in one of your papers was you said it wasn't feasible at the time the paper was written to be doing this en masse because it was a very tedious procedure. So does this test essentially make it more feasible? Dr. Monson Yeah. The way we discovered MS PreCISe was actually looking at the antibody genetics of single B cells, which we sequenced using Sanger sequencing. Sanger sequencing is a very elegant immunogenetics-type method. So we spent about a year and a half re-tooling that technology to use next-generation sequencing. So now all we need to do is get a spinal fluid from a patient, and then we extract the DNA directly from that, and we sequence from the entire pool instead. And actually, what's nice about it is we also get a much deeper database from each single patient because we see all of the DNA from that sample now instead of just the few B cells we were able to sort before. It's really nice in that respect because we get a much broader idea of the repertoire. So that is what MS PreCISe is based on is being able to use next-generation sequencing now to really pull those antibody genetics out of individual patients. MSDF What are the unanswered questions at this point? Dr. Monson Well, there are a lot. But I think the one that strikes me the most is whether or not we can pull the antibody gene signature out of the blood. If we can do that, it would get rid of all these spinal fluid taps that our patients have to undergo right now. And so we're working really hard to see if we can find a way to pull them out of the blood so we don't have to do these spinal fluid samplings any more. That's probably our biggest one. The other thing that we're really interested in, once we can find the signature in the blood, it shouldn't be too hard for us, then, to start asking questions about whether or not family members have a higher risk of getting MS. Which is probably one of the primary questions I get from patients all the time: Can you test my daughter? You know, I'm worried about her maybe getting MS someday. And so that motivates us to think, yeah, we got to get this test ready in the blood so we can start asking those kind of questions. I also think MS PreCISe will be a good monitoring tool. I mean, maybe we do keep treating patients with rituximab, but we don't re-treat them unless they're MS PreCISe score starts to creep back up again. So we're hoping that it's a way to also monitor efficacy of different drugs for that matter. So those are the things we're really working on pretty hard right now. MSDF Great. I appreciate it. Thanks. Dr. Monson Sure. Thank you. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Seventy-nine of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

Full Transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. A lot can be learned about pregnancy and MS by tracking pregnant women and their offspring over time. Dr. Dessa Sadovnick, a professor of medical genetics and neurology at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has started such a registry with international colleagues. I spoke with her at the World Congress of Neurology in Santiago, Chile, in November, where she described these efforts and what a very focused registry can tell us. Interviewee – Dessa Sadovnick I'm not talking about a general registry. What I'm talking about is a pregnancy and outcome registry. So this is not just taking people who have MS and trying to keep track of them. This is looking at actual pregnancy outcomes and what happens to the children after. So it's a very specific type of registry. Interviewer – Dan Keller It seems like there's a multitude of variables you can look at. What sorts of things are you going to be tracking if you get this going? Dr. Sadovnick Well, I think the important factor is that just because you have a disease such as multiple sclerosis doesn't mean you're immune from other factors that can affect pregnancy outcome and child development. So in addition to knowing about drug therapies, disease course, other exposures related to your MS, it's also important to know about your previous pregnancy history, your family history, your basic demographics, including your ethnic background, comorbid diseases which you may also have with the MS. All these factors can affect pregnancy outcome and child health. MSDF Will you be looking at the mother's longitudinally? Or only the children? Dr. Sadovnick Ideally, we'd like to be able to look at the mothers up to a year post-partum, and then follow the children longitudinally. Because there are situations where children do not have a certain disease that the mother may have, but over time, they might be found to have some late onset problems, for example, related to learning disabilities or something like that. MSDF Can you separate those out by biological cause or environmental cause? They're in a household with people who have a disease and have to deal with it. Dr. Sadovnick Well, we know for a fact in terms of MS that there is certainly no transmissibility within a household. We have done a lot of work over the years that show very clearly that the excess of MS you find within biological relatives of people who have MS is very clearly due to genetic sharing, not shared family environment. So from that point of view of the child inheriting MS, we're not looking at the family environment. Obviously, there're many psychological issues and many socioeconomic issues related to having a parent who has a chronic disabling disorder. And the impact this could have on child development must, of course, be taken into consideration. But what I'm trying to look at here is more the general factors in terms of, if the mother is exposed to a disease-modifying therapy at the time of conception or in early gestation, and if there is an adverse outcome in the pregnancy, is that necessarily correlated? Or could that have happened for many other reasons? Similarly, if the child develops problems down the road, could that be related, maybe, to the uterine environment because the mother has an autoimmune disease? Which does not mean the child gets an autoimmune disease, but maybe, in some way, it impacts the autoimmunity long-term? MSDF How long would you have to track children? And how many would you have to track to get meaningful numbers? Dr. Sadovnick Well, this is obviously always a concern, and you would have to track a sizable number. But when you consider how many people there are with MS in North America, and if you could do a centralized registry, I think it's realistic that you follow them at least for a few years after delivering. Once they start reaching their developmental milestones, you can get some ideas. But I think the main factor is that we're always saying, therapy is not indicated if you're contemplating a pregnancy. And this causes many issues for many people. But the evidence for this is so scarce. And my big concern is that, are we really being overly cautious? And we won't know this if every adverse outcome is automatically trying to be related to exposures either at conception or in the early parts of gestation. MSDF Pregnancy itself is immunosuppressive, but it seems women have a rebound after delivery. So what goes on with treatment during pregnancy? Is it okay to stop treatment if they're naturally going to be somewhat immunosuppressed? Dr. Sadovnick This is one of the big areas that we really don't have information, and we need good information. Obviously, if you look at a series of women, what seems to happen is especially in the third trimester, they seem to do better. And then, of course, once you deliver and their hormonal changes take place, there's an increase of relapses after delivery within the first three months. That's not to say women can't have relapses while they're pregnant. That is not to say that women are going to have relapses necessarily after delivery. But if you look at large numbers, this is the pattern. The question then comes up, if you have a relapse while you're pregnant, how severe is the relapse? And how should it be treated? There're no set guidelines. The same way as after delivery, a big factor is whether the mother's breastfeeding or not breastfeeding. In today's society, you're really encouraged to breastfeed, but that could have impacts on how you treat a relapse. The other big issue in terms of pregnancy-related relapses is something that we also experience when we look at people who have MS and they're going into menopause. And that is, are the symptoms really an MS relapse? Or could they be pregnancy-related? If you have a symptom, say you have urinary problems, say you have balance problems, say you have fatigue, how do you measure if this is specifically an MS relapse versus just part of either the later stages of pregnancy, the early stages of pregnancy, or living with a newborn child? There is really nothing concrete on how to measure what's a true relapse, what's a pseudo-relapse. And there are no really specific guidelines on how to treat these symptoms during gestation and immediately after delivery. This is an area that we really need to develop. One of the things that we have been able to do is a lot of people are interested in this topic, but it's never been looked at in a formalized manner using experts from many different areas. So about a year and a half ago, I put together a meeting of a group of people who are interested in reproduction and child health. And we received some funding to have a two-day meeting from the Canadian Institute of Health Research, as well as some money from Teva Neurosciences and Biogen Idec. And what we did is we had a two-day workshop basically saying, is there a need to learn more about this area? And if there is, how can all these specialists work together to try to develop knowledge-based information? So we gave our little virtual network, which has no ongoing funding; it's basically people just working voluntarily. We've given it the name of MS CERCH, which is Center of Excellence for Reproduction and Child Health. And we've put together a voluntary working group. And where we're at right now is we've actually just had a paper published in Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American main journal. They also call it a Green Journal, but it's not neurology. Just talking about limitations, guidelines, what we know and what we don't know about reproduction and child health. So this was published the end of 2014. We're currently working with the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology to try to have our paper turned into some guidelines for people with multiple sclerosis. We've also just recently as a group published a paper talking about why there is a need for a disease-specific registry rather than a treatment-specific registry. We are also just submitted a manuscript looking at all the issues dealing with males with MS in terms of reproduction and child health, because the focus, of course, is on females. But there're still a lot of males out there, and they face many issues that have not been addressed. And we're in the process of trying to get some funding for the first-ever grant to look prospectively at the occurrence of peripartum depression in both mothers and fathers who have multiple sclerosis, a topic that's never been looked at before. So from our two-day meeting, which was quite casual and informal, we have been able to move forward, and as a group, had some concrete outcomes. And we're hoping that we're be able to move forward with this group, hopefully obtain appropriate funding, and we're be able to, maybe, really come up with some knowledge-based information for people with MS who are contemplating reproduction. Another major area of concern is we're more frequently now identifying the pediatric population with multiple sclerosis. The focus on this population has largely been the recognition that MS does occur in the pediatric population. But what's happening is as years are progressing, this pediatric population is evolving into a population who are capable of reproduction. How diagnosis of pediatric MS can impact not only reproductive ideas, but also just behavior in teenagers, and how all this is interrelated is not known as well. So it's a whole other area that we really need to understand. MSDF Are you looking for buy in from clinicians in all of North America? Or restricted to Canada? Or worldwide? Dr. Sadovnick Ideally, we'd like worldwide. Realistically, right now in our group, we're basically clinicians who are in Canada and the US. We have some buy in from some clinicians in Europe, and it's the obvious problem when you don't have resources, the buy in has to be voluntary. So we do have strong connections between Canada and the US, and we're working forward to try to make this a topic that is more at the forefront. MSDF You have a pretty good system of linked databases in Canada. Can that help you with this? I mean, you know diagnoses and pharmacy and death records and hospital visits and everything else. Dr. Sadovnick Linked databases are a very important resource, but they are exactly what they are: linked databases. You're not dealing with the actual people. You're dealing with how the information has been recorded. So while for some purposes linked databases are extremely important, and there's been a lot of work published out of Canada, including with our group in British Columbia using the BC record linkages. They are informative. But it's not the same as actually dealing with the actual people, because record linkage cannot tell you everything you need to know about the person. Just to use an example in terms of pregnancy outcome. You can identify a woman who has MS. You can look at when she had prescriptions filled for her disease-modifying therapy, for example. You can look at if any birth defects were registered for the child. But what you don't know is, did this mother have previous pregnancy losses? Registries only have live births. Does the mother have a family history of some relative with a certain disease? Could the mother have comorbid diseases that for some reason are not linked into her medical history? Maybe she's moved from another country. Maybe she doesn't have the health coverage. So there's a lot of issues with record linkage. And I think it's very important to know that it has strengths and limitations. But it's not the actual end of everything. The other issue with record linkage is it's someone's interpretation. For example, if it's recorded through record linkage that you have a given disease, it's assumed that all the appropriate diagnostic tests have been done. But is that necessarily the case? Could the person who's actually doing the coding reading from the records make that assumption? So you have to be careful. Years ago when I started in clinical genetics, we had a BC health surveillance registry. And the idea was to basically identify any children who had been within the hospital system in the first seven years of their life. And it was a provincial recording system. But the truth of the matter was is when we went back, and I spent a lot of time working with colleagues going back and reviewing the actual forms from which the data was collected, and the amount of errors you would find. Even in something as simple as MS, looking at cause of death. If you look at record linkage, sometimes it doesn't always note the cause of death the person had MS. Sometimes if there's asphyxia, the question is, was it just asphyxia? Is it related to the MS? Is it from something else? Another issue is very often people who have a specific disease like multiple sclerosis and they die, the real cause of death is ignored. Very often we know that cancer, for example, is underdiagnosed in a person with a specific disease like MS. Just because you're having bladder problems, it's often attributed to MS, where in fact, you could actually have bladder cancer, as an example, or bowel cancer. So if you look at all these data, I think it's important to realize that record linkage is a very useful tool, but it is not the only tool that should be used. MSDF Finally, where does this all stand? You mentioned that you have people doing it on a voluntary basis. Do you foresee something more formal? Dr. Sadovnick We're trying to get something more formal in North America. Obviously, funding is the issue. And right now we're trying to get the drug companies to realize that, if they would work together to have a proper pregnancy registry, it might be in everybody's interest, rather than just assuming that the drugs are not advised during pregnancy or when trying to conceive. The problem with all these registries is that where does the money come from? In Canada, we have a very interesting scenario right now where they're trying to put together a registry of people who have multiple sclerosis in Canada. This has nothing to do with pregnancy. This is just, who has multiple sclerosis in Canada? A registry with minimal data sets. And this started with the Canadian Institute of Health Informatics. This has been going on for quite a few years, and I'm on both the technical and the medical advisory committee for this. But the problem is, who's going to fund it? The concept was to enlist the ministries of health to get involved and fund it, but each ministry of health has its own issues in each province, and their interests are different. So even though the concept there was to try to get a cross-Canada registry for people who have MS, funding after many years of trying is still a major obstacle. It's a big issue, but this is why I'm hoping at least if we can focus on the idea of pregnancy, maybe through some research funding or company funding, we'll be able to at least get a pilot started that will start to answer some of these questions. A lot of money is being spent by each drug company looking at their treatment-specific pregnancy registries. And if we could get them to realize that if they all work together, we might get somewhere. It would be nice. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Seventy-eight of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.

Full transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Interferon beta is a well-known and long used treatment for relapsing-remitting MS, but it's not without potential problems for some patients. While at the ECTRIMS conference in Barcelona last fall, I spoke with Kaarina Kowalec, a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Neurology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. We discussed interferon beta and other drugs and their potential for liver toxicity. Interviewer – Dan Keller In terms of liver toxicity of interferon beta, what's the problem? Interviewee – Kaarina Kowalec I would say that about 1 in 50 patients that are exposed to this drug will experience a side effect known as drug-induced liver injury, or liver toxicity, essentially; it's an abnormality in their blood work. Most times it'll just go back down to normal and everything is fine, but in the rare occurrence sometimes it can lead to more severe outcomes such as needing a liver transplant, sometimes even liver failure, and sometimes even death. That's definitely a very rare scenario, but it certainly is an issue, and it's definitely a worry for some patients and definitely for clinicians, as well. MSDF Also, it's not only interferon, a lot of drugs have liver effects. Is that right, new drugs especially? Dr. Kowalec It's the number one reason that drugs are taken off the market, and it's usually one of the top concerns for any new drug that's entering into the market. Obviously, the liver has many different functions, but one being that it detoxify foreign components like drugs like interferon, like alcohol, food, many different things. So it definitely plays a major role, that's why it's usually effected so much.   MSDF What are some of the factors that affect both efficacy and toxicity of drugs in general? Dr. Kowalec You know, if you see it kind of a pie chart, the genetic component can be pretty variable. So from person to person, it could be anywhere from a few percent to up to 50 to 60%. But the rest of that pie, I guess, is made up of variation in how much of an enzyme we make that needs to detoxify the drug, as well as our age, our BMI—how much we weigh—how tall we are, whether or not we're male or female. There's a variety of different demographic-type factors that come into play, as well. It's definitely very difficult to predict who will have a safe and effective response to a drug. MSDF Does polypharmacy play a role, especially you had mentioned enzymes; things that induce or suppress enzymes? Dr. Kowalec Yeah, definitely. So in the case of an interferon, there's some evidence to suggest that interferon might suppress some of the cytochrome, or drug-metabolizing enzymes. And in that case if they were taking any additional medications, such as like Tylenol (acetaminophen) or ibuprofen, that could create an issue because interferon is inhibiting the enzymes that are necessary to detoxify the acetaminophen, then obviously the body might have trouble with just acetaminophen on its own. MSDF All interferon betas, do they vary in their effects? Dr. Kowalec Yes. The versions that people with MS get as a drug therapy, there is a few different variations. So I guess half of them are made in a Chinese hamster ovary cell line, and then the other half are made in an E. coli cell line. So there are differences in the immunogenicity of those two forms, so the ones that are made in the animal cell lines are more similar to the version that we would all make endogenously, whereas the versions that are made in the E. coli cell lines are different, they're slightly more immunogenic. They're just more foreign than what we would normally make. MSDF Is it a difference in amino acid sequence, or glycosylation, or both? Dr. Kowalec Yeah, exactly. So the amino acid sequence is slightly different for the E. coli cell line versions, as well as the E. coli version is not glycosylated. So, again, that's why it's a little bit different than the human version. MSDF Do you know some of the mechanisms by which interferon betas cause liver injury? Dr. Kowalec So how it causes liver injury exactly is certainly unknown, and that's definitely an area of which I'm trying to figure out. There's two sort of competing theories, I guess. One is that interferon, because we make it endogenously, but this version is obviously still different than the version we make, it might be that obviously in MS they have an aberrant immune system; they could be recognizing the interferon as being a foreign agent and its attacking it, and then some of the cytokines that are released might be targeting the liver. So that's one theory. The other theory is that once interferon is incorporated into the cell, it might have some sort of direct effect on the mitochondria, and so it might be that it's reducing the energy metabolism of the cell and causing harm into the liver. But which of those two, we're not sure yet. MSDF Do you know risk factors for liver injury, and as they are picked up by aminotransferase elevations? Dr. Kowalec Yes. And some of the risk factors that we know for interferon-induced liver injury are related to gender, age. Sometimes it's polypharmacy, so whether or not they're taking acetaminophen or ibuprofen. One study will come out that'll say that there is an effect, one study comes out there's no effect, so it's still a little bit unclear. With gender, we know that for males they are more likely to have some of the more minor transient elevations in the aminotransferases, whereas females are more likely to be at risk for the more severe symptomatic hepatitis, or liver injury, I guess. MSDF And is it equally prevalent, or there's different gender prevalences? Dr. Kowalec I would say that overall when we looked at all the genders together, it was about the same, about 1 in 50, or 2% or so. I would say that if you're looking at just severe injury, the effect that's more symptomatic, something that a patient would actually notice, it's likely that females are more susceptible. MSDF What about duration of treatment, does that have an effect; early, late, how long? Dr. Kowalec Yeah, typically it's quite quick that they would experience this. So the median time is about the first 3 months is the greatest risk period—I guess probably 3 to 6 months – but it certainly can still occur later on, say even 2 to 5 years, or even 7 years later on, so that's why it's still really necessary to remain diligent on testing their liver aminotransferase levels even later on, even like I said, 5 to 7 years after being on treatment. The effect doesn't seem to go away, for some people anyways. MSDF I suppose while you're taking it you're getting older, and also you probably have different medications coming in and out. Dr. Kowalec Yeah, and it's not even just the other pharmaceutical therapies that you're taking, it could also be your diet, how much you exercise. There's a lot of things that can affect the liver aminotransferases, unfortunately, so sometimes it can be difficult to determine whether or not it's actually interferon beta that's the causative agent. MSDF What should patients be looking for? Dr. Kowalec You know, I think just staying up with a healthy lifestyle; not drinking excessively, eating the right foods, making sure that whatever therapies that you are taking are compatible with interferon. Your neurologist or your clinician will advise you on those areas anyways, and also keeping an open dialog with your neurologist in that you know exactly what the risks are with taking any medication. And most times your clinician will be able to tell you everything that'll be possible side effects, so just keeping an open dialog with the clinicians, I think, is great. MSDF Are there symptoms which might raise concern? Dr. Kowalec You know, I mean sort of the typical things that we think of with liver issues, like jaundice, abdominal pain—they're really like, I mean, abdominal pain that can be a symptom from many different things, right? Malaise, same thing. Really I would say jaundice is probably one of the things that would stick out in my mind to most people as having an issue with your liver, right? By the time you notice symptoms, it certainly is in the more severe end, so usually you have something else that would precede that, like the abnormal blood work. So most people don't get to that stage, which is good. MSDF Is there something physicians should be doing or looking out for? Dr. Kowalec No, I would say they're doing a really great job with just monitoring the blood work. They know that once typically patients get to 5 times the upper limit of normal for ALT, or the liver aminotransferase, that's when it's recommended that they stop the drug. So normally because they are tested quite often for the blood work abnormalities, the clinicians are really going to go about monitoring by lowering the dose of the drug or just stopping them, and then slowly titrating them back on again. They still have many options if they experience the side effects, so they're doing a great job with monitoring. MSDF Is this becoming less of a problem with new drugs, vis-à-vis, interferon beta itself? Dr. Kowalec I believe almost all of the new oral medications have all had some case reports of having liver injury associated with them, which is unfortunate. But, again, like I said, most drugs will use the liver in order to be detoxified, it's not, I guess, surprising that this is happening. So I think that we definitely need to study the theory. And that's sort of why we're studying interferon beta, because there's so many people that have taken it, there's enough people that we can study, whereas the new medications, they haven't reached sort of that level yet; they don't have 20 years of data yet. So that's why interferon beta really represents a really great way to study this type of side effect, because now hopefully maybe some of these findings we can apply to the new medications that are going to be more relevant in the future. MSDF Have you been able to see whether a history of interferon beta affects susceptibility to liver injury with any of the newer drugs? Dr. Kowalec I've seen a few patients that have had liver toxicity from interferon, and then gone on to take, say, glatiramer, and they have had that same reaction, or Copaxone. Individual clinic, they've seen it, but they just haven't had many publications on that, so it's sort of unclear, I guess, right now. I guess I should still say in the wider literature in other liver toxicity from, say, like antibiotics, there are some common mechanisms. It seems like that some people, that if they have it to one drug, they have it to multiple drugs. So there could be some underlying, I guess, common mechanisms between all of them. MSDF It would be hard to separate out whether it's a function of the patient being susceptible liver to liver injury from almost anything, versus having a history specifically of beta-interferon. Dr. Kowalec Yeah, we don't know the long-term effects of interferon beta, we don't know really what happens to them in the long run. We can only really follow the ones that have had the really severe outcomes, like liver transplant, for example. But people that experience the more minor elevations, or even the level that we study, most often we see that the liver enzymes go back down to normal. But, you know, we're only looking at this for maybe 5 to 7 years, and then after that we don't know what happens. And then, of course, then once they get older, you would expect that things might go downhill and they might have more issues. MSDF Have we missed anything important? Dr. Kowalec This is an area that with respect to toxicity with the MS medications, it's definitely an area that is not as well studied, because, of course, the overall goal is to have an effective treatment. If we have an effective and safe treatment, that's the end goal, but that's not always what happens, because we can't sort of have everything that we really need. And so I think studying these areas is definitely really important, because although patients want their disability to be prevented, they're willing to take a lot of risk. And they shouldn't have to, they should be able to have an effective treatment that is safe, as well. So I think by studying these adverse drug reactions more often, I think we'll hopefully get to that end goal eventually. MSDF Very good, thank you. [transition music] Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.  

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Eighty-one of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. The science of pharmacogenomics can help identify those genetic variants that are associated with a high or low risk for experiencing an adverse drug reaction or a beneficial therapeutic response. While at the ECTRIMS conference in Barcelona last fall, I spoke with Kaarina Kowalec, a postdoctoral fellow in the Pharmacoepidemiology in MS research group at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. We discussed the potential for using pharmacogenomics to optimize the risk/benefit profile in a patient's favor, focusing first on the risk of liver injury with interferon-beta. Interviewer – Dan Keller How are you using pharmacogenomics to assess the risk for interferon-beta-induced liver injury? Interviewee – Kaarina Kowalec Yes, essentially we have two groups of patients. We have ones that have had the drug reaction and then the other ones that have been exposed to the same drug, but do not have the drug reaction. And so we take a saliva sample from all of them, and then we’re basically looking for genetic markers that would either increase or decrease the risk of having the drug reaction. And so by recruiting all these patients, we can use their saliva or their DNA to study whether or not they have some kind of genetic variant or genetic marker that would protect them from having the drug reaction. MSDF Are you doing genome-wide association studies or looking for specific markers? Dr. Kowalec Yes, we’re doing two-fold actually. So the first one is a candidate gene study. So this is looking at a more targeted approach to looking for genes that, based on previous literature, would be likely to be involved in the mechanism of predisposing to liver injury from interferon. So either this is related to interferon the way that it’s degraded in the body, the response towards interferon is regulated, or it can be related to the liver toxicity side. So there’s a lot of other studies that have been done looking at the genetic basis of liver toxicity from, say, flucloxacillin, amoxicillin clavulanates, a few other thrombin inhibitors, and some other cancer therapies. And so from that information we can look at those genes in our cohort. So that’s sort of the targeted approach. And then secondly, we’re doing more of a hypothesis-free type of approach, which is a general genome-wide association study. So this is where you look at every gene in the human genome, so over 20,000 genes. In each gene, you would look at, say, a few different markers within each gene. So we have a total of 1.7 million different markers that we’re looking at to see if they modify the risk of experiencing liver toxicity. MSDF Are you also doing the basic investigation, essentially heat maps, to see what genes are induced or suppressed when interferon is given? Dr. Kowalec No, so that would be, I guess, more microarray or gene expression. I think that would be sort of the next stage. If we could isolate one gene that would be involved, then we could I think then look at the expression of the gene, because, of course, that would be also important to see if interferon has any direct effect on turning on or turning off or reducing or increasing the level of a certain gene. But that would be probably for the next project, I think. MSDF Are you trying to develop a risk assessment model? Dr. Kowalec Yes, so essentially kind of like a test. So it would be once a new patient would come into clinic and, say, they were going to start one of the interferons, we could take their clinical and demographic information, like whether or not they were female, whether or not they were within a certain age group, whether or not they drinked, whether or not they took different concomitant medications; and then, as well, take a spit sample from them. And then, hopefully, within a few hours or a day or so we could tell them whether or not they would fit into a low risk or a high risk of having the drug reactions. So then the clinical decision by the neurologist or the nurses could then decide what medications they should go on. Of course, if they were in the low risk category, put them on that drug. And then if they were in the high risk, then maybe suggest something else, or still go on the medication and maybe just have more blood work done to monitor them a little more closely. MSDF Where does this stand? Developing a model is a long process. Has it started yet? Dr. Kowalec We’re in the discovery phase, so I’m going to be presenting the discovery phase where we’re initially trying to find the markers. And so we’ll finish this up within the next few months, and then the validation phase, which is basically where we would want to replicate these findings in an independent international cohort. So we have another cohort of patients that are from the US, as from Europe. That will probably take about a year or so. And then from there you could maybe implement it into the clinic, but likely the goal with looking at interferon-induced liver injury might be that we would use this information to study drug reaction with the newer medications. Because the new oral medications come into being used more, interferon might be used less, and so this just might provide some pilot work, I guess, for some of the newer oral medications. MSDF Will all this focus always on liver, or are there other toxicities that you would look at? Dr. Kowalec There’s definitely quite a few areas that I would want to look at. One, of course, is probably in the mind of most clinicians and patients as well would be PML or progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy with natalizumab and then also with some of the newer medications as well. That would be probably the one, you know, stands out in most people’s mind that would be the likely area to study to see if we can reduce the incidence of that type of more severe drug reaction for sure. Some of the new medications definitely suppress the levels of white blood cells quite a bit, but that still kind of also ties in with PML. Mitoxantrone is not used quite as much, but it’s got a limited amount of use, because it’s associated with not only leukemia but also with inducing heart toxicity. That’s another area that would be frightening, obviously, for a lot of people. But I think those would be sort of how you could kind of round out what areas would be next likely drug reactions that would be needed to be studied. MSDF Do these kinds of investigations require networks of collaborating centers or databases? Dr. Kowalec One center definitely can’t do it all. In order to get the number of cases that you need of the drug reaction, you probably get maybe 5 to 10 per center, and so you probably need somewhere in the range of 60 to 100. And so what we did was, because of the really strong network that we have in Canada of the Canadian MS Clinics, we use that, as well as we capitalized on another drug reaction surveillance network called the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety. Using those two different networks, we were able to recruit enough patients to form our discovery cohort. And then for the replication cohort, we used some of our connections in the US and then abroad. But definitely it’s a multicenter type of study, for sure. MSDF Can these sorts of models be used also for predicting who will respond best to a drug, not only worst? Some drugs are taken from the market, because you get adverse reactions, but they work for some people who don’t have adverse reactions, and that’s a loss. Dr. Kowalec Yes, it’s definitely unfortunate, and even in the case of natalizumab, where it was taken off market because of PML, there were obviously patients who were so passionate about having this drug available to them that they were able to get that decision reversed and just released on a more stringent, I guess, criteria. I’ve never heard of a drug being put back on the market because of pharmacogenetic findings or because someone was able to find a marker that would prevent people from having a drug reaction. I think that, for example, the FDA or Health Canada or any of the European agencies I don’t believe that they would feel comfortable enough with letting a drug back out there knowing that, even if they found some kind of genetic marker. Two drugs, ximelagatran (7:17) and one other cancer therapy, they were taken off the market because of liver toxicity concerns. And what’s interesting is that it was about a similar incidence as what interferon-beta-induced liver injury was. But, of course, with MS there wasn’t many medications, so that’s probably why interferon was probably allowed to stay on the market. But those drugs were taken off the market, and then they found some genetic markers, but they weren’t quite as strong, I guess, as they were hoping. And so it was not going to work as a predictive risk model or as a predictive genetic test, so they weren’t going to be allowed back on the market. But I think the ideal time to look at these types of genetic markers would be probably in some of the final stages of, say, clinical trial testing. And maybe pharmaceutical companies might be doing this, I’m not sure, but to look at these types of genetic markers in those stages would be really beneficial, because if you see them as they’re developing them, you could offer them as kind of like a companion diagnostic type of test, so whenever they would release the drug. Usually these drug reactions don’t actually occur until you’ve treated probably ten to fifteen thousand people, so that’s the other difficulty. So maybe another stage would be to just do sort of like an active surveillance to sort of recruit patients as they’re on the drug and just monitor all of them. But, of course, that takes a lot of money and takes a lot of time, so you need the funding for that type of study. MSDF This would be like a Phase 4 post-marketing study. Dr. Kowalec Yes, exactly. And they do that, right. They do a lot of active surveillance for drug reactions whenever a new drug comes onto market. But to actually develop some kind of predictive biomarker test at the same time, is not really done pretty readily, at least to my knowledge. So it would be great, because if you see how much money goes into developing every drug, you know, and if we want to keep it on the market, then maybe that’s what you have to do. MSDF People are developing in vitro liver assays. I guess that’s an early stage sort of thing before they go through a whole development process. Dr. Kowalec Yes, exactly. And that will definitely help as our technology certainly gets a lot better in the future, and we can study the liver much more readily, especially in people with MS. Just studying MS as a disease on its own is really difficult, and so studying the liver is very low down the list. And so we don’t even know really if MS affects the liver on its own, so that could be another entire study. MSDF Anything important to add? Dr. Kowalec You know, I really hope that we eventually get to a day where patients can take a drug that’s really effective. We’re definitely getting there. We’re definitely getting drugs that are more effective, but at the caveat that they definitely are more toxic. That’s definitely unfortunate, because the patients are scared, right? These side effects are fatal sometimes and are really very worrisome. And I can give one anecdotal experience that I had with a patient that experienced liver injury from interferon. And I’ve certainly had a lot of people that didn’t really believe that this drug reaction was all that important sometimes to study. And I met this one patient that experienced it, and she said, you know, I’m not really worried about this drug reaction itself. It’s just I don’t know what has happened to my liver. I know this one instance is over, but now for the rest of my life, I’m scared of every drink that I have or every time I want to take an acetaminophen pill for a headache or a fever or whatnot. If they don’t have to worry about one additional thing, you know, they’re already worried about how MS is going to affect their life. If we can maybe eliminate something like this, it’ll help some patients. MSDF Very good, thank you. Dr. Kowalec Thank you. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Eighty-one of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.  

Full transcript: [intro music] Host — Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Pregnancy and the postpartum period present special concerns to women with MS. Dr. Annette Langer-Gould, a neurologist and epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles, investigates ways to lessen the risk of relapses in these women. We discussed the effects of breastfeeding, among other topics, when we met at the ECTRIMS meeting last fall in Barcelona. Interviewer – Dan Keller In terms of pregnancy and breastfeeding in MS, what are you looking at? Interviewee – Annette Langer-Gould We're studying modifiable risk factors for postpartum relapses in women with multiple sclerosis. And specifically, we are looking at starting therapy shortly after delivery, whether that can reduce the risk of postpartum relapses, whether breastfeeding, particularly breastfeeding exclusively, could reduce the risk of postpartum relapses, and whether vitamin D levels play any role in increasing or decreasing the risk of postpartum relapses. MSDF And are these women who are on disease-modifying therapy throughout pregnancy or not? Dr. Langer-Gould No. In our population, a little over 60% were treated prior to pregnancy. But we do have a decent number of women who had decided to never go on disease-modifying therapies before, and almost all of them stopped disease-modifying therapies either shortly before or when they find out that they're pregnant. MSDF In terms of each of those outcomes, what are you finding? Dr. Langer-Gould We haven't analyzed the data for the vitamin D yet, but in the German pregnancy registry, we just published the data in exclusive breastfeeding, and once again showed that exclusive breastfeeding does protect against postpartum relapses. In that population, actually 96% of the women had been on some sort of DMT prior to pregnancy, and none of them were treated throughout pregnancy. We also found that resuming DMTs does not seem to have a big effect on reducing the risk of relapses, particularly in the first six months postpartum. MSDF Is that in women who are exclusively breastfeeding or not? Dr. Langer-Gould Ah, so that's a good question. So there is no good safety data on taking the medications during breastfeeding. And therefore, many clinicians and most patients are concerned about potential theoretical risks. So behaviors are actually mutually exclusive. Women typically will either breastfeed or resume medications early in the postpartum course. The other thing we find in the Kaiser population is that there are still a fair number of women who neither breastfeed exclusively or resume their medications, which presents sort of an interesting opportunity. If we could show that one or the other behaviors is protective, perhaps we could encourage either exclusive breastfeeding or resuming DMT. MSDF If women are not breastfeeding, do you have an idea of the time course of resumption of risk for relapse? Dr. Langer-Gould Yes, so the concern about postpartum relapses really is about having a relapse in the first three to four months postpartum. If we look over at the whole pregnancy year, and that's about 30% to 40% of women. So this is actually still the best defined risk period for having a relapse and actually the only clear trigger—with perhaps the exception of upper respiratory tract infections—of relapses. So we know that having just had a baby or having an upper respiratory tract infection is a pretty strong predictor of having a relapse. So it presents sort of a unique opportunity to also look at other biological factors, like vitamin D, which is why we're interested in it, to see if any of these things have a strong role in relapses as well. MSDF If women are breastfeeding postpartum, what is the hormonal profile like? Is this almost like an extension of pregnancy? Dr. Langer-Gould For women who breastfeed exclusively, meaning that they breastfeed to the point of suppressing their ovaries and not resuming menstruation—so that essentially there's no regular meal that's being replaced by formula or by table food in the baby—they have very high prolactin levels. So it's actually a little bit different than being postmenopausal, in the sense that they have very high prolactin levels. And they have incredibly low nonpulsatile FSH and LH levels. In the postmenopausal period, there occurs a very high FSH and LH levels. The similarity, though, is that they both have bottomed-out estradiol and progesterone levels, in both women who are breastfeeding to the point of suppressing menses and also postmenopausal women. And of course the other similarity is that there's no ovulation occurring, either during pregnancy, during exclusive breastfeeding, or after menopause. MSDF So it sounds like breastfeeding is really a hypothalamic pituitary suppressant as opposed to in menopause, where you still have those cranking away, but just no response from the ovaries. Dr. Langer-Gould Correct. MSDF Can this be used in any clinical sense? Do you see an application? Dr. Langer-Gould The most obvious direct way to translate these findings is that that, if you have a woman with MS in front of you and she is pregnant and she tells you she'd like to breastfeed, we certainly have no good reason to discourage her. And that if anything, I would suggest that the data we've already published would point to the fact that we may want to encourage exclusive breastfeeding, provide them with lactation counseling, and also sort out exactly what the optimal duration of exclusive breastfeeding may be for these women. Is it really only eight weeks, which we had defined arbitrarily? Or does longer duration of exclusive breastfeeding have additional suppressive properties? And that would, of course, have implications in the United States for things like maternity leave and work accommodations to allow that to continue, if it has a strong therapeutic effect for the mother. MSDF What's the relapse rate among postmenopausal women compared to postpartum women? Dr. Langer-Gould So relapse rate declines with age. And so it typically in postmenopausal women, although there's not great data, we would expect them to have relapse rates of less than 0.3 per year, Annualized relapse rates of less than 0.3 per year. And in postpartum women, that first three to four months, the annualized relapse rate exceeds one. MSDF But men also have a decline in relapse rate as they age, too. So you can't attribute it to lower estradiol. Dr. Langer-Gould Exactly. Yeah, I think it's far more complicated than just a simple sex hormone effect. You know, that was sort of our first instinct from pregnancy or the reason pregnancy must be protective. It has to have something to do with estradiol or the very high progesterone levels. And that's what prompted the postpartum study and also the estradiol randomized control trial. And both of those, of course, disappointingly have been negative. In isolation, the sex hormones associated with the protective effect of pregnancy don't really have a protective effect on inflammation. It's probably more of a combination of factors that play into modulating the immune response. MSDF Where do you go from here? Dr. Langer-Gould I think that if we are able to reproduce the findings, looking at this population-based source, that early resumption of DMTs is not particularly helpful, but perhaps it may be later in the postpartum year, and that exclusive breastfeeding is, again, protective, then I think the next step really is to establish the safety of some of these medications during lactation. For several of them, there's really no biologically plausible reason to think that they would have an effect on the baby, as they're not likely to be absorbed through the gut or enter into the baby's bloodstream. Examples of that would be the large molecules like Copaxone, the interferons, and also the infusion medications, Tysabri (natalizumab), and rituximab as well. Although you may be able to detect them in breast milk, they are such large molecules that they would not diffuse across the baby's stomach and into the bloodstream. Think about it. If the mom has to take it as a pill, it is very likely to be transmitted to the baby. If the mom has to take it as an infusion or injection, very unlikely that oral route through the baby would have any effect. MSDF How sensitive is this effect to, as you said, exclusive breastfeeding? Can you start introducing formula, or it's all or none? Dr. Langer-Gould That's a really good question. So we did look at that also in the German pregnancy registry. So first of all, women tend to have very defined behavior. They tend to decide to supplemental feed with formula very, very early, before they've even established their full milk supply. So to back up even further, a healthy woman gives birth to her child. Usually menstruation will resume two months after delivery, not one month. So it does take the HPA gonadal axis a little chance to recover from those high-circulating hormones of pregnancy. And in women who introduce supplemental feedings, particularly early, we also see the very same thing; that they will resume their period at two months postpartum. Actually, most of the work done in this field has been done by nutritionists who are in developing countries who are interested in knowing what you should do if you see a starving mother and a starving baby. Who should you feed? It turns out that if you feed the baby, the mother's ovarian function will resume. So any regular supplemental feedings and very quickly their prolactin levels will drop. The pulsatility of the FSH and LH secretion will return. Ovulation returns, and so does menses. It's essentially sending the mother's body a signal that the baby no longer needs nutrition from the mom to survive, so she's ready to have another child. So the right thing to do in that situation would be feed the mom, and let her nurse the child. Biologically, it's very interesting. Even though some breastfeeding is better than none for the baby, in terms of the effect on the mother's HP [hypothalamic-pituitary] ovarian axis, some supplemental feeding is just like all supplemental feeding. MSDF Have we missed anything or anything interesting to add? Dr. Langer-Gould So I guess I would say just in general, women's, and now even men's, desire to have naturally-born children has taken on a new significance with a lot of the small molecule agents, because we need to consider family planning and discuss it much earlier, as small molecules are likely to have an effect even if they get pregnant accidentally on the developing fetus. This is a challenge we haven't had before, because large molecules won't cross the placenta in the first trimester. And the first trimester is the critical period for organ development. So it's sort of new era for MS neurologists, where we really, really have to think carefully about which medication we put them on if they're planning on having children soon. So I’d strongly encourage that you have that conversation very early and have it with every followup visit. I typically will ask them, are you planning on having children within the next two years? And if they say, no, I ask what kind of birth control they're on, or in some cases they're in same-sex couples. That's obviously an exception. And if they are not on a reliable form of birth control, I think you need to think twice about giving the small-molecule agents—so the pills, basically. MSDF Should MS neurologists work with high-risk OB/GYNs? Dr. Langer-Gould I think for the most part it's not necessary, because women with MS, they don't have abnormal complications at pregnancy. I think there are certainly situations that we're running into now. If they get pregnant accidentally on fingolimod, teriflunomide, or Tysabri, we do need to work with them, mostly for the baby. So you may want to do more intense early screening if the mother is culturally open to the idea of having an abortion. You may want to do more fetal ultrasounds, perhaps even a fetal MRI, if there's suspicion of major malformations early on in pregnancy. And also for the Tysabri, really, it's not so much about organogenesis, but if they've had later exposure to Tysabri during pregnancy, which unfortunately on occasion has been necessary to control rebound disease activity during pregnancy, that, you know, we have seen hematological abnormalities in some of these children, so far none with clinical complications. Only one child had a subclinical intraventricular hemorrhage that resolved. It's still concerning. Our experience is very small, and we would certainly highly recommend that those women give birth in a hospital that has a neonatal intensive care unit available and a pediatrician on call to examine the child and also make sure that the child doesn't have a severe thrombocytopenia or anemia at birth. MSDF Do the different drugs have different risks for fetal malformations or other dysfunctions? Dr. Langer-Gould Yes. So teriflunomide, or Aubagio, is the most concerning medication because if a woman gets pregnant on that accidentally, it is, you know, a category X drug because it can interfere with neural tube development. And although you can chelate to get the medication out very quickly, the safety data from other indications, you know, the rheumatoid arthritis and lupus literature, is not particularly reassuring in terms of fetal outcomes. So I think that's sort of the number one to stay away from if a woman is planning on getting pregnant. And it's also one where, you know, there is some concern, although not strong evidence, that it may also affect the offspring of men with MS who are on the medication. In terms of the other ones, of course, again, small molecules in fingolimod has about a 15% to 16% major fetal malformation risk with early pregnancy exposure. It has a very long half-life. So even if they stop the medicine the minute they find out they're pregnant, it takes over two months for it to be cleared, which means that the baby has seen it now through the entire first trimester. That can have significant effects, both on cardiac and brain development. And then with dimethyl fumarate, we haven't seen—now of course, this is a very new drug, so we don't have nearly as much experience—we have not seen any major malformations, but there was concern in the animal models that it could interfere with cognitive development. In particular, the rats had maze-finding difficulty. MSDF Is alemtuzumab indicated at all? It seems to have a long tail. Dr. Langer-Gould I'm not sure what the half-life of alemtuzumab, but it's probably similar to other monoclonal antibodies, which is usually around 15 to 20 days. So monoclonal antibodies don't cross the placenta in the first trimester, because it's a very large molecule. So large molecules only get across if there's an active transport system. For antibodies, there is an active transport system, because it's very important that the child be born with a high dose of antibodies received from the mother to help protect them during the early part of their infancy while their own immune system is still developing. So we see maternal antibodies being transported, and of course, monoclonal antibody medications would be dragged along with that during second trimester. And it goes up in elliptical fashion, with very, very high amounts being pumped across the placenta in third trimester. And they also, of course, have a very delayed clearance mechanism, both the fetus really has no clearance mechanism, and then even the neonate has a very slow clearance mechanism. So in TNF alpha studies, if the drug is given during third trimester, it's typically not cleared until about six to nine months postpartum. So you also have to be concerned that a baby exposed would have some of that medication hanging around during the early neonatal period and give some thought to whether or not their immunization scheme would need to be adjusted, as the cautionary tale there would be TNF alpha exposure during pregnancy. There was a case reported of a woman who had very severe rheumatological disease, had discussed with her rheumatologist the potential risks and benefits of taking it throughout pregnancy, opted to take it throughout pregnancy. And then living in an endemic area for tuberculosis, the baby got the BCG vaccine and got disseminated mycobacterium and died. And that, you know, was probably directly related to impaired immunity from the TNF alpha antagonist. And sure enough, the baby was born with fairly high cord levels and also had very high levels still remaining in the blood in the neonatal period. So it's not just once the baby's born, it's like the drug is out. So drugs like alemtuzumab and rituximab, the way in which they work, even though the drug could be long gone, but the effect of the medication works very long time. So those are actually good choices for women with highly active disease who are planning on getting pregnant. And you have concerns about rebound. I mean, we typically use rituximab because it's obviously much safer than alemtuzumab and seems to do a fairly good job. But you know, these aren't medications we should be giving while they're pregnant, but probably not a big effect in crossing the placenta and on the baby if they're used prior to pregnancy. MSDF If they can plan that well and get a pulse of that early, and then get pregnant a few months later. Dr. Langer-Gould Yes. Yeah, that's always the trick, right? And they do get pregnant accidentally on just about everything we put them on. So the infrequent infusion medications is the easiest because you can ask about last menstrual period. And you can ask about birth control use, and you can do a pregnancy test the day of, a quick urine dipstick and find out so that you don't accidentally infuse a pregnant woman. Of course with Tysabri, when you're giving them an infusion every month, it gets a little tricky. Usually people just kind of get tired of it. The nurses forget. The doctor forgets to order it, although it's not necessarily bad practice if you know you have a patient who is not on a reliable form of birth control. MSDF Very good. I appreciate it. Thank you. Dr. Langer-Gould You're welcome. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Seventy-seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.  

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Today's interview features Elaine Kingwell, a research associate at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She and her colleagues have gathered and recently published incidence and prevalence figures for people with MS in the province. I spoke with Dr. Kingwell at the ECTRIMS meeting in Barcelona in October to find out the reason for the study and to explore the changing trends she found and their significance. Interviewer – Dan Keller What prompted you to do this study? Interviewee – Elaine Kingwell In British Columbia, we know that Canada has got a high incidence and prevalence rate of MS, but we don't actually have the numbers, so we've been doing a lot of research on MS in British Columbia for many, many years. But we don't have the incidence numbers for BC, and also the prevalence is out of date – the estimates that we have – so it really was time to get an idea on how many people we have in BC. And also, we wanted to look at change over time, and we have access to some amazing administrative databases in BC and also had some algorithms that we could use that have been validated, so that we could identify people with MS in the databases. MSDF Why are these numbers important? Dr. Kingwell It's important for lots of different reasons. For instance, it's important to monitor trends over time. We're able to do that in BC, because we have data going back several years. And so, it's important to see if populations are changing, so that we can get some clues about whether environmental factors might be changing. And also, for the prevalence estimates, it's important to know how many people have MS in the province, so that healthcare planning can be done wisely and resources. MSDF How do you go about looking at this? Dr. Kingwell So as I mentioned, we did use the health administrative databases in BC, which are big databases that collect data on the whole population. A number of different databases were combined, including hospital admissions and physician visits. It's all claims data, so that when someone goes to see their physician, a billing claim gets put in with their diagnosis. So we use these codes to identify people with MS. And we basically estimated the number of people with MS [over] several years – one year at a time – so that we could look at change over time for prevalence. And we also estimated the incidence, the number of new cases each year, starting in '96 right up until 2008. MSDF What did you find in terms of incidence and prevalence? Dr. Kingwell Well we found the incidence and prevalence are both high. The incidence was around 7.8 per 100,000 per year, and the prevalence was around 180 to 200 per 100,000 in 2008. So they were both high, what is relatively high compared to other places in the world and similar to rates that have been found in Europe, in Northern Europe, and other parts of Canada, as well. MSDF And the prevalence is increasing over time? Dr. Kingwell Yeah, we found that it increased quite significantly by about 4.7% per year, so a big increase. It also shifted in the predominant age of people, so that the peak prevalence age was around in the mid-40s in the 1990s, and it's now shifted up into the mid-50s. So the population of people with MS is getting older in BC. We also saw with incidence … quite differently, the incidence was not changing over time, so it stayed relatively stable; it did fluctuate as incidence always does. But over time, on average, it stayed the same. MSDF Are those two pieces combined—increasing prevalence and older age—good news? Dr. Kingwell I don't know if any of it's good news. It means that we have an older population that are probably requiring more care, as they get older, for the MS, as well as, of course, comorbidities they may have. So, it's certainly something that healthcare planners need to be aware of. And we have an aging population, in general, in Canada, as we do in other parts of the world, but we have a lot more people with MS at an older age. MSDF But doesn't that mean they're surviving longer? Dr. Kingwell That's the good news part, yeah. And it does mean that, because we're not seeing a change in incidence, the most likely explanation is that the survival is better. People are surviving longer with MS. We're seeing an increase in survival for the whole population, but we're also seeing an increase in survival for people with MS. MSDF What about the gender ratio in terms of prevalence but also in terms of survival? Dr. Kingwell We're seeing a gradual increase in the number of women relative to men in prevalence. That's most likely due to the fact that women do survive longer than men, on average, of course that's highly variable. But on average, they survive longer than men. And so, if you've got an aging population and three-quarters of the people with MS are women, then you're going to find the number of women are increasing. MSDF How did the socioeconomic status affect the findings? Dr. Kingwell Yeah, so we did actually look at socioeconomic status. It was measured at the neighborhood level, so not the individual level. It's linked into the databases by postal code. We did find that there were more people with MS in the higher levels of socioeconomic status, but the absolute differences were not that great. And, when we looked at this, it was not linked or adjusted for other factors. So there's so many things that can be attached to socioeconomic status and, of course, age is one of them, and your age is greatly related to whether you have MS or not. And so, there are other possible explanations, so we don't put a lot of emphasis on that. When we look at socioeconomic status, we really think that you need to design a study specifically to look at that. MSDF Could you look at the use of disease-modifying drugs according to socioeconomic status? Dr. Kingwell We could, and we have actually looked at that in other studies. Again, as a kind of an adjustment factor or something to bear in mind when we're looking at lots of variables at once, we find there's the same kind of trend that people in the higher levels tend to be on drug more often. But again, the absolute numbers are very small, and it could totally be related to age or other factors that are not adjusted in. MSDF Were the data there to be able to look at early initiation of disease-modifying drugs and any effects it may have had? Dr. Kingwell Well for this particular study – in the incidence and prevalence study – we looked at just whether people had ever had drug. We looked at the incident population to see if they'd had it in the last three years or so—that's the three years from their first claim, which is close to when they're first diagnosed or recognized as having MS. And for the prevalent population, we looked at whether they'd ever had MS. So we were able to tell that about a third of the cases had had a disease-modifying drug. And this study did start way back in the early 90s and then mid-90s for the incidence cases. So, you would expect it to be a lower rate because the drugs were just starting to become available in the mid-90s. So we didn't look at the actual start date of the drug for this particular study; we certainly are able to look at that because we have access to the databases to look at those kinds of questions, and we are looking at those kinds of questions in other studies. MSDF Can you put your findings in context to other studies at other latitudes, locals, healthcare systems? Dr. Kingwell Yeah, that's a complicated question. Certainly as studies are similar to the findings from some other studies. In particular, in Canada, there's been some very similar studies done in Manitoba and Nova Scotia where we've used exactly the same algorithm that was validated in those provinces led by Dr. Ruth Ann Marrie from the University of Manitoba. So, we found that prevalence and incidence estimates are very similar, and the findings and the change over time are also very comparable. When we look at some of the other countries, there are some similar findings in other places, but they vary a lot. When it comes to latitude, of course, we didn't have a big latitude gradient in our study; we were just looking in BC, and most of the people in BC live in one area around they're concentrated in the south of the province. But certainly there's a lot of variation in findings. But in order to get a look at the change over time, you really need to look within the same population on more than one occasion rather than comparing between populations over time. It's really difficult to make that comparison. MSDF Do you have a particularly good situation in BC in that you can link databases of diagnostic codes, physician visits, hospitalizations, pharmacy benefits, things like that that may not exist in other places with a less coordinated system? Dr. Kingwell Yeah, definitely. We are in a situation where we have access to some amazing databases. Many of the provinces in Canada have the same or similar databases, so it is like that. We also have the great situation that we have a clinical database in BC too where we've been collecting data on MS patients over a very long period of time. And we can link that data into the administrative databases, so we have the depth of the clinical data that we can link in the breadth of the administrative data, which has really put us in a very strong position to look at these long-term followup studies. MSDF Is it pretty smooth to be able to delve into these databases, or do you have any regulatory barriers like, in the US, we have all these HIPAA things. Do you have a problem with de-identifying or anything like that? Dr. Kingwell It's certainly not smooth. It can actually take us several years to access this data. It's a long process. It's a lot of paperwork for all of the reasons that…or some of the reasons you just mentioned. The data is actually all handled through…when we're at UBC, it's handled through Population Data BC, which is kind of the center between the Ministry of Health and the databases. And they strip all the identifiers off, so that by the time we receive any data … we, of course, have to go through a lot of privacy concerns and justification before we get any data sets. All the names and the numbers are removed, so that we don't know who anybody is in our database. Even when we're linking our clinical data, of course, everything is completely anonymized by the time we work on anything like that. MSDF What kind of conclusions can you draw from what you've found so far? Dr. Kingwell One of the main conclusions, I think, is that the incident population has leveled off, apparently, in BC. We started measuring incidence in 1996, and it's possible there were changes in incidence before that, but we can say that in the last 13 years – up to 2008 – that the number of cases has leveled off, which is good news it's not increasing. We also can say that the number of prevalent cases, on the other hand, is increasing a lot, so that the services need to be aware of that that there's going to be a demand on the healthcare system, there already is. And also that our results are very similar to as seen in other parts of Canada and comparable. The other main conclusion I would draw is that this study really shows how you can utilize these types of databases and reliable algorithms and ways of identifying people with MS in order to monitor the number of people and also changes over time. And also can give us some information about the people with MS and what kinds of drugs they're taking because we're linked into the PharmaNet databases, and we can do that too. So there's lots of questions we can answer about the population in British Columbia. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Seventy-five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music] We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.  

Full Transcript: [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Today's interview features Donna Osterhout, a cell biologist at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, USA. Dr. Osterhout talks about a new way of looking at myelin-making cells, which move and change shape in dramatic ways. Current MS drugs take aim at preventing new immune damage. In the future, researchers hope to figure out how to repair myelin and restore function. But first, let’s look at new content on MS Discovery Forum. Spring brings rain, flowers, and a bouquet of scientific meetings related to multiple sclerosis. See the list at msdiscovery.org under the tab “professional resources.” MSDF sent the only journalist to cover the recent meeting of the American Society of Neurochemistry in Denver, but you can count on a blitz of news from the media pack at the next meeting on the calendar – the American Academy of Neurology in April, happening this year in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The number of research papers about multiple sclerosis has doubled in the last 10 years, and many findings are first reported at meetings before publication. Moving on, let’s sample a few of the new papers we found in our weekly PubMed search of the world’s largest medical library, the National Library of Medicine. You can link to each week’s list of curated papers at msdiscovery.org. Related to this week’s podcast, a new paper reviews the latest research about the molecular cues that allow precursor cells to mature and go through the stages of making myelin. These cues come from axons and from other surrounding tissue. Clinical drug development efforts focus on overcoming inhibitory cues, such as with the experimental agent anti-LINGO-1, now completing phase 2 clinical trials for MS and acute optic neuritis by Biogen. The review authors suggest future drugs to repair myelin could boost permissive and promotional cues, which may go wrong in disease. The paper is published by researchers at the Virginia Commonwealth School of Medicine in the journal Experimental Neurology. Another report updates the Cochrane systematic review on teriflunomide, a daily oral medication for relapsing remitting MS marketed under the brand name Aubagio by Sanofi Genzyme. Cochrane’s systematic reviews are ranked among the highest level of medical evidence, because of the rigorous independent analysis of multiple studies, including randomized controlled trials. The authors write that, as a single drug, the high dose of teriflunomide was as effective as interferon beta 1-a, while the low dose was less effective. They recommended longer follow-up analyses and noted that the available evidence was low-quality, as well as subject to bias, in part because all studies were sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. In general, side effects were mild to moderate and do not usually lead to treatment being stopped, but the higher dose is more prone to cause these side effects. The study is available in the Cochrane Library. The final editor’s pick this week takes a fresh look at how medical images transform a patient’s view of her own body. The paper describes an artistic collaboration between Devan Stahl, a bioethicist at Michigan State University with multiple sclerosis, and her sister Darian Goldin Stahl, a printmaker. The resulting art – some of it life sized – superimposes Devan’s narrative and MRI images with body photos. Devan wrote in the paper that the art collaboration has made it easier to talk about her MS. The paper is published in the journal Medical Humanities. If you're in town for the big Neurology meeting, you can catch Darian’s artist talk on April 17 at 2 pm at Malaspina Printmakers in Vancouver, Canada. [transition music] And now to our interview. We caught up with Donna Osterhout in Denver, Colorado at the March meeting of the American Society for Neurochemistry. She organized a symposium that told a new story about myelin-making cells. In different labs, researchers started looking for clues in the radical shape changes that occur in the cells in their normal process of making myelin. These oligodendrocyte precursor cells sprout “arms” to reach out and touch neighboring axons. Then they push out slabs of fatty membrane and wrap them around and anchor them to the axons. In multiple sclerosis and other demyelinating diseases, the immune system attacks this myelin wrap, and the cells cannot keep up with repair. The unprotected axons may be damaged or destroyed, causing the worsening disability of MS. Learning how the cells make myelin may pave the way toward new therapeutic agents to repair demyelinated axons and restore function. Dr. Osterhout spoke with our executive editor, Carol Cruzan Morton. Interviewer – Carol Cruzan Morton So we are here, in Denver, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Neurochemistry, and you've put together a very interesting panel on a new way of looking at myelin. So can you sort of set the scene for us when you're talking about the myelin research that you're working on? Interviewee – Donna Osterhout Well, myelin is a specialized membrane that is wrapped around axons; it occurs in the last step of development. And oligodendrocyte progenitor cells are the cells that form myelin. They are going to migrate out through the developing brain and they're going to extend processes that come in contact with axons that need to be myelinated. And when they get the appropriate signals, they are going to start a process by which they synthesize and extend a large membrane, which wraps around this axon many times and compacts and forms myelin. The way that this happens has been a mystery thus far, but recent research suggests that there has to be a lot of rearrangements of the internal cytoskeleton for this to happen. And so the symposium was organized to talk about how the cytoskeleton might be changing to allow for this membrane wrapping and myelin formation. MSDF Can you tell me more about the cytoskeleton? Dr. Osterhout The cytoskeleton is comprised of specialized proteins within cells, and every cell has a cytoskeleton; it gives it shape, but it also allows it to migrate, differentiate, and extend processes, so cells wouldn't be able to do much without a cytoskeleton. And in the case of oligodendrocytes, there are a lot of cytoskeletal rearrangements that occur to allow for myelination. MSDF Can you tell me more about the emerging view about how myelination may be working based on this new way of looking at it? Dr. Osterhout Initially, we know that there are early signals that trigger extensive process outgrowth from these cells. Once the axon sends a signal to the oligodendrocyte progenitor cell, they start to put out many, many processes, synthesize myelin proteins, and make this big membrane that will wrap around the axon. What winds up happening is that in the past everybody thinks that we've needed a driving force so that something pushes this forward, and it had been thought that perhaps the actin cytoskeleton was the driving force behind this. The newer research indicates that initially you have to have signals that trigger the process outgrowth, but this is followed by an actual disassembly of the actin cytoskeleton. So it's somewhat opposite of what we had thought previously. MSDF Can you tell me more about the steps that are involved in the process of myelinating that you and your colleagues have been discovering? Dr. Osterhout Well, the initial step is the activation of a cellular kinase called Fyn tyrosine kinase; this is the earliest step in the differentiation of these progenitor cells. Fyn will be activated by any number of signals from the axon including, for example, glutamate that's released. And once Fyn is active, it initiates a rearrangement of cytoskeletal proteins called microtubules in order to facilitate process outgrowth so we can extend processes to form this membrane. In later stages, then we have Fyn helping to trigger the synthesis of myelin proteins, and then you start to get other proteins active that will disassemble the actin cytoskeleton. There is even some evidence that perhaps myelin basic protein can do this. So Fyn signaling will turn on early and promote the synthesis of myelin basic protein, and then myelin basic protein will proceed down these processes and help to disassemble the actin cytoskeleton so the membrane can wrap around the axon. MSDF Can you describe what the cells look like when they're going through this process? Dr. Osterhout Well, this is really interesting to study, especially in vitro. You can set up myelinating cultures of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. They're very simple cells, they're like bipolar, two to three processes, and that's the earliest progenitor that we might look at. But once you trigger differentiation, they start to put out processes in a somewhat predictable manner. They will first extend five processes, and then these five processes start branching And they produce these intricate branches. At some point these mature cells will actually look like a lace doily; they are spectacular with the cell body in the center and all these highly branched processes surrounding it. And then you see a transformation of these processes into this huge membrane sheet, and in the absence of an axon it's just going to cover the tissue culture dish; it's amazing how large this can get. But if you had an axon in the culture, this membrane sheet would just form myelin. They would form a myelin segment wrapping around the axon. MSDF That’s so interesting. And then can you say, adding to that picture, the steps that are happening in those process that you and your colleagues have been discovering? Dr. Osterhout So when you have the initial process outgrowth, you have Fyn tyrosine kinase active, and that facilitates the initiation and that extensive process outgrowth. But the transition between the process outgrowth and the formation of membrane sheets is going to be the disassembly of the actin cytoskeleton. MSDF And that's the big news is that the actin cytoskeleton is breaking down instead of pushing the myelin forward as it's making its multiple wraps around? Dr. Osterhout Yes, this seems to be the way that this is happening mechanistically. The formation of that myelin membrane requires the actin disassembly, and two of the speakers that we had in our symposium gave evidence to this, using several different experimental systems. And then ultimately when you're going to anchor this myelin sheath, and you can get some specializations in the axonal membrane, and this is what one of the speakers talked about, anchoring the perinodal loops, kind of the ends of the myelin segment. And so we have a process by which we have extensive process outgrowth triggered by Fyn. Then once you get the process outgrowth, you have actin disassembly and you form these membrane sheets, and then they would wrap around the axon, forming myelin, and then you would stabilize it with special proteins in the axon that stabilize the ends at the perinodal loops. MSDF So what does this have to do with diseases like multiple sclerosis? Dr. Osterhout That's a very good question. If we understand what goes on in development, then we might be able to predict how we could facilitate this process in a demyelinating disease like multiple sclerosis. We do have oligodendrocyte progenitor cells in our brain and spinal cord. They persist as a population throughout adulthood. And any time you have a lesion or a trauma to the brain, and especially if you get demyelination, then you'll have these cells migrate to the area of demyelination. And if we can encourage them to remyelinate, they would undergo the same steps. We have shown evidence that the inflammation and other conditions in a demyelinating disease upregulates chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans, and these can actually inhibit the process outgrowth and remyelination by oligodendrocytes, because they ultimately inhibit the activation of Fyn kinase. So if you're considering a disease process, you want to stimulate these steps. And you want to look for agents that might trigger and make sure that these steps proceed, or neutralize things that would be present in the lesion that would inhibit this. MSDF One interesting aspect of your work, and perhaps of science more generally, is that some of these discoveries with relevance to multiple sclerosis come from your work on spinal cord injury. Can you talk about how that works in science? Dr. Osterhout Well, spinal cord injury is another type of lesion, it's a specialized lesion; you have damage to axons as well as demyelination due to trauma. But in diseases in general in the brain and the spinal cord, whenever you have an injury process or inflammation or some kind of destruction of tissue, you get an inflammation and immune influx, and you will get a process called reactive gliosis. And this is common to many diseases that you see in the brain. For example, you can see it easily in spinal cord injury, it's been well documented. You can see these proteoglycans' reactive gliosis in multiple sclerosis, you can see it in Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and other conditions, because they all have a common element that you've got some kind of inflammation occurring and tissue destruction occurring at a specific place. MSDF Getting back to multiple sclerosis and the work on how cells myelinate axons, what are the next big questions that you and your colleagues are asking? Dr. Osterhout Well, there still are a lot of questions about exactly how this myelination process is accomplished even during development; we don't fully understand all of the triggers that would activate this process. And, likewise, we don't always understand things that might inhibit this process. So we need to more fully characterize what's going on in development so that we can take a look at it in the remyelinating situations, either in spinal cord injury, or multiple sclerosis, or any other demyelinating condition. MSDF Well, that's really interesting. Well, thank you for taking the time to explain the research. Dr. Osterhout And thank you for your interest; it's been my pleasure. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Seventy-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music]  

Transcript: [intro music] Host — Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy-two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. Today's interview features Nathaniel Lizak, a young Australian investigator from the University of Melbourne who gave the first talk at the recent meeting in New Orleans of the Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis, or ACTRIMS. Mr. Lizak discusses new findings showing that moderately advanced and advanced multiple sclerosis are more unpredictable than anyone knew, but worsening disability may be slowed by highly effective therapies. But first, let’s look at new content on Msdiscovery.org. Our latest data visualization shows statistical snapshots of MS worldwide. Survey data from the MS International Federation show that, as of 2013, the estimated number of people in the world with MS increased to 2.3 million, or about 33 people with MS for every 100,000 people. But MS rates and access to care vary widely from country to country, as you can see from the data visualization. In a new job posting, the Stanford-affiliated Santa Clara Valley Medical Center Department of Neurology seeks a general neurologist. Subspecialty training in MS, movement disorders, or vascular neurology is preferred. You can post your job at MSDF at no charge to reach researchers and clinicians specializing in MS and related demyelinating disorders. [transition music] And now to our interview. Australian medical student, Nathaniel Lizak, and his academic mentors took a second look at how disease progresses in people with moderate and advanced MS and what can be done about it. Researchers are looking for better measures of disability, but the most common one is the Expanded Disability Status Scale or EDSS for short. Lizak and colleagues looked at worsening disease from several starting points, using an international registry known as MSBase that tracks medical record data on nearly 38,000 people with MS. They divided people in three epochs ranging from EDSS 3.0 (where people are moderately disabled but are fully ambulatory) to EDSS 6.0 and higher (where people need assistance to walk short distances). An older study suggested a steady worsening of disease after EDSS 3.0, which Lizak and co-workers questioned. Executive editor, Carol Cruzan Morton, spoke with him about their findings. Interviewer – Carol Cruzan Morton We are here at the ACTRIMS meeting in New Orleans, and you opened the conference with a really interesting paper. I wanted you to explain a little bit about what you were asking and why. What area of MS, what questions you are addressing? Interviewee – Nathaniel Lizak So we did this work under the MSBase group, which is an MS-based cohorts; it is an international really large study that has data from over 30,000 patients worldwide. We have access to all of their data, and we really thank our contributors throughout the world who have provided this. We decided – because we have so much power with so many numbers and so much data from patients – to look at the latest stages of multiple sclerosis which, so far, haven't really been that well explored. There have been three studies in the past which looked at disability and how it progresses in what they have called the moderately advanced stage of multiple sclerosis. So yeah, we looked at disability accumulation in the later stage of multiple sclerosis moderately advanced, which is defined before as between the EDSS steps of 3.0 or 4.0 and 6.0, and we wanted to look at what predicts how the disability accumulates, because a lot of the previous studies didn't really suggest anything really changes disability. There is this notion amongst doctors that once it hits these thresholds the trajectory is set, and there is nothing you can do to help patients. We didn't believe that. We were hoping there was something you can still do for patients, even once they have already accumulated substantial amounts of disability. We set this up to look at just how much variability there is in these later stages of disease and what we can do to take it from going really fast to going really slow, to preventing patients from getting even worse. We used our cohorts, ran lots of statistics, and we found some very interesting results. The first is that this late stage of disease is quite independent from what happens before. How many relapses people have early in the disease, how fast they got to the early disability landmarks, how fast they accumulated disability, if they were on therapy in the past—all of those things don't really seem to impact what happens later on in the disease. That is what we call the amnesic disease phenomenon. That is something that has already been explored in the past. We kind of confirmed that and saw that, that happens at lots of stages in multiple sclerosis. What is more interesting, though, is that we still found that patients have a lot of variability in what happens to them, even after they have accumulated substantial disability. So in technical terms, after EDSS 3.0, 4.0, and 6.0, there is still a lot of variability in what happens to patients after they have reached these steps, after they have already obtained disability. That suggestion that after the threshold the disease is set doesn't seem to be at all the case. That is all we observed in our patients. We had over 3,400 patients— we had 3,415 patients exactly. So it is quite I think, generalizable, our results. There is a lot of variation in what will happen at these later stages of disease. MSDF You can't predict what happens next. And it is different. Mr. Lizak It is different for everyone. It is independent of what happened before, and almost nothing predicts what is going to happen next. The only things that we found which did predict such as how does disability progress in these later stages, the first one was how many relapses they are having now. Not before, not early in the disease, but how many relapses are they now having per year at these later stages? We found that more relapses later in the disease still contribute to disability. That wasn't something that the other studies had actually shown, and I think that is to do with their methodology more than anything else. I think we are confirming that relapses are still important, inflammation is still important, we still need to treat it, no matter how far along the disability line the patients are. The relapse is still a problem. A more exciting thing that we found was that the immunomodulatory medications that the disease modifying therapies, the higher efficacies ones, the new medications, the longer patients are on those in the later stages of disease—so again, after those landmarks, after EDSS 3.0, 4.0, and 6.0—he longer patients are on those after they have gone into that disability the lower their likelihood of progressing even further to EDSS 6.0 and 6.5, which is mobility issues needing unilateral assistance or a walking stick, EDSS 6.0 or bilateral walking assistance EDSS 6.5. So those are pretty, obviously, important to patients in being able to move around without needing any aid. We found that we can prevent patients from getting to these later disability stages with longer time on disease therapies later on in the disease. So the conclusion we got from this is patients should continue being treated later in multiple sclerosis. Of course, it's always a risk/benefit calculation. You always need to take the side effects into consideration and look at the patient that you are seeing. It is not a blanket rule, but there are countries in the world where it's by policy you can't give therapies later on in disease after EDSS 4.0. New Zealand is one example. In other places in the world, it is just practice to stop giving treatments later in multiple sclerosis, and we are suggesting no there still is a benefit and you should be weighing that up when considering whether or not to continue patients on therapy, whether to start them on stronger therapies. There is evidence that we can still slow down how the disability will accumulate. That was our main message. We were a bit surprised to find out it was not what we were expecting, but we are very happy that we found such results. MSDF In your study, what drugs were categories as the high efficacy? Mr. Lizak I don't remember exactly every single drug, but we just put into two groups. The low efficacy being primarily the initial very first-line drugs, so interferon, glatiramer acetate, and teriflunomide; everything else categorizes as high-efficacy therapy, so natalizumab, fingolimod, alemtuzumab, dimethyl fumarate, cladribine, mitoxantrone, I might be missing a few. By no means are we saying that one therapy is better than another. We're just looking at the class effect of the really strong medications. We don't yet have the power to say this is the best medication after EDSS 6.0, this is the best medication after EDSS 4.0, or don't go on that one. We're just trying to say that the stronger perhaps second-line therapies often used second-line do have a better effect in this later period of disease, and doctors should be considering that when deciding what treatments their patients should go on, and patients should obviously be made aware of that as well. MSDF The idea that things that happen before don't affect the later stages seems on the surface to be at odds with the idea that progressive disease starts early, like treat early. Mr. Lizak …to try to treat disease as early as possible. I don't think it is at odds. There's been a lot of work, so far, to say that the earlier you treat your patients the better. We agree with all of that. We are not saying treating later is any better. Probably believe that treating earlier is better, but what we are saying is: a) continue treating, and don't stop treating. I completely agree that all of the patients that we found that after EDSS 3.0, 4.0, and 6.0 improved with more therapy after those landmarks, still probably did better earlier on in their phase of disease with therapy then. But I guess what we saw is the therapy they had earlier in disease won't make an impact now. You need to continue treating these patients for them to have an improvement. We still absolutely encourage the earlier treatment, the better. That evidence is beyond doubt in multiple sclerosis. We are definitely not challenging that. We completely agree with that. Our evidence just goes and takes it one step further of, the earlier the better, but it is not too late. MSDF Now you are doing this study in the context of a clinical practice. How has that changed – or has it changed – how people with MS are treated in the decision making? Mr. Lizak The thing is, first of all, I am a medical student, so I don't make any of the decisions. Secondly, where we are based in Melbourne, Australia, there is already a tendency to treat patients later on in disease. Obviously we haven't published the results yet, so we haven't seen how much of an affect it will have worldwide. Perhaps now we will begin to start changing things. But in Australia where nothing was studied, no one was surprised to find that this was the case. All the doctors there already treat their patients later on in the disease. So it just confirmed that what they are doing is correct. No one has yet drastically changed how they are treating patients. We hope though that, say countries like New Zealand whereby policy after a certain EDSS score, after EDSS 4.0, after moderate disability has been accumulated, you can't put patients on disease-modifying therapy anymore—we hope that is where we will have the biggest impact. MDSF When you gave your talk, you talked about the earlier study. There wasn’t an appreciation for the variability. How did you come to ask that question in the first place? Mr. Lizak I have to give credit to my supervisor, as well as the whole MS based team that was behind this study, and obviously they conceptualized it a lot more than I: Dr. Thomas Kalincik and Helmut Butzkueven, in particular. But a lot of doctors, particularly our team, are not happy with that graph. Which it looks like everyone after EDSS 3.0 has the same trajectory. We looked at this, and we thought we wanted to do a study to prove this wrong. We didn't know exactly what we were going to find. We actually proved that what they first suggested of disease being independent to be quite correct. But they just missed the variance in the second half. It is independent, but it is still really variable. We looked at the graphs carefully, and we looked at the study carefully, and we made the note of they only have a mean value on that top half, they don't show how much variability there may or may not be in disease. We got confused. We said it is unlikely that patients have no variability at all after EDSS 3.0, and we decided not only are we going to look at what predicts the later disease, but we need to know just how variable is this disease this late, and we found that it is extremely variable. After EDSS 6.0, patients might go straight through to worse disability, and many will improve, and many will stay stable for many years. We were just unhappy with the message that the graph gave. Then we tried to scrutinize exactly where can we change this message, where can we improve this. MDSF That’s great. What questions are your colleagues asking you here about the study? Mr. Lizak I have had a lot of questions about this study, some more helpful than others. A lot of people have asked how will this change management? And I think we have just spoken a little bit about that. I am asked, as well, how do you tell patients that we can no longer predict their disease? We used to think that we could and now we just outright can't predict their disease and that is something that is going to be difficult to tell the patients. I think you need to frame it differently. It is not we can't predict how your disease is going to go, it is, we have hope for making it better. You might have been doing not so well up until now, but we still have hope to continue fighting. We haven't given up yet. And I think that is what we need to be framing it as. That is one of the questions I have gotten the most. A lot of people have asked about why we chose certain therapies, and there is very little evidence about which therapy is high and which therapy is low. We just used the available studies as well as the clinical experience and just compared how much they reduced relapse rates and so on. It was partly based on intuition and observation. It could be the case that some therapies should have been classified differently to what we did, but it is very hard to tell at this stage. Even then, even looking at the list, you should be mindful that a therapy that we classified as high efficacy might have actually been bringing that group down. And maybe should have been a low efficacy therapy, and maybe a low efficacy therapy was the only one working in that group, and it should have been in the high efficacy group. So obviously, be very careful when you look at that. At that strata, it is not meant to be telling anyone I should be on that drug or I shouldn't be on that drug. It is just meant to be saying that strong medications are better in this stage, but the decision of the medication should be a decision made entirely by the patient and their doctor, and it should only be used to influence and it shouldn't be taken any more than that. MDSF Is rituximab in your …. I was going to say before a B cell therapy. Mr. Lizak I don't think we have many patients on rituximab, but we would have had quite a few. Yes, because it was used quite extensively. MDSF Thanks. Is there anything else that I haven't asked or that you wanted to add? Mr. Lizak Rituximab wasn't the high efficacy group. I should mention that. Yes. Thank you for the fantastic opportunity to showcase the work we have been doing. I obviously have to give credit to everyone at MSBase who conceptualized and gave patients the study. We couldn't have done it without the help of our collaborators worldwide. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Seventy-two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. The data visualization was developed by Jean Mercier of Khawai Data Visualization at Khawai.com. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. [outro music]   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller.      

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Seventy of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. In today's interview, we'll talk with Dr. Brian Weinshenker of the Mayo Clinic about new diagnostic criteria for neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder and how it differs from MS. The new criteria build upon and broaden the definition of NMO that was based, in part, on the presence of antibodies to aquaporin-4. But to begin, let’s sample a few of the new studies we found in our weekly PubMed search of the world’s largest medical library, the National Library of Medicine. You can link to each week’s list of curated papers at msdiscovery.org. On topic with our interview, an international team led by researchers in Tianjin, China, found a unique group of people with neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, or NMOSD, who carried autoantibodies to both aquaporin-4 and myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein or MOG, a minor component of myelin. Among the 125 patients, 10 were double positive for both sets of antibodies, and 14 were positive only for MOG. The double-positive patients had a worse disease course, most having MS-like brain lesions and more disability. Those with only MOG antibodies had a milder disease and less disability. If verified in other studies, the findings may help predict the clinical course of NMOSD or even define a new phenotype somewhere between the two very different diseases of NMOSD and MS. The authors say their paper also raises a new challenge of how to diagnose and treat such patients. Three double-negative patients did not respond to rituximab, a highly effective anti-B cell therapy used off label for MS and NMO. The study is published in the journal Science China Life Sciences. For people with MS and other demyelinating conditions, bladder issues can play an oversized role in the quality of life. A pair of review articles addresses the “neurogenic bladder.” One from Duke University researchers in North Carolina, USA, recommend an evaluation known as urodynamics, calling it the gold standard in helping to break down the complex problem into basic and treatable factors. In the other paper, researchers from Western University in Ontario, Canada, review the 16 different ways to measure patient reported outcomes for neurogenic bladder, and how to choose the best one to track patients’ quality of life. Both reviews are published in the journal Translational Andrology and Urology. In the news section, MS Discovery Forum correspondent Stephani Sutherland wrote about the recent negative results of fingolimod in a large Phase 3 clinical trial of people with primary progressive MS. Even in failure, studies can be informative and can help researchers design better investigations to test potential therapeutics for progressive disease. Now, let’s move on to our drug development database. The drugs with important additions and changes are daclizumab, fingolimod, and ocrelizumab. One update reflects findings presented at last month’s ECTRIMS conference in New Orleans suggesting that in primary progressive MS, the experimental drug ocrelizumab reduces disease activity in subgroups of individuals with and without gadolinium-enhancing images at baseline. [transition music] And now to our interview. It’s been 11 years since neuromyelitis optica, or NMO, was redefined as a separate disease from MS. Thanks to the discovery of the first biomarker for NMO, an antibody against aquaporin-4, diagnostic criteria for neuromyelitis optica, or NMO, were revised. In today's discussion, Dr. Brian Weinshenker of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, USA, lays out further revisions to the criteria and the reasons for them. He uses a couple of terms that may warrant definition. One is IgG, which is immunoglobulin G, a particular class of antibody. Other terms are seropositive, meaning, in this case, the presence of antibodies to aquaporin-4, and conversely, seronegative, the absence of such antibodies. Finally, ADEM, A-D-E-M, is acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, a sudden, widespread attack of inflammation in the brain and spinal cord, usually seen in children. I spoke with Dr. Weinshenker at the ECTRIMS meeting last fall in Barcelona about the new consensus diagnostic criteria for NMO. Interviewer – Dan Keller Is there something that was lacking before? Interviewee – Brian Weinshenker Well, the first diagnostic criteria for neuromyelitis optica were proposed by our group at Mayo Clinic in 1999. And in 2006, with the advent of the first diagnostic biomarker for neuromyelitis optica, an antibody which we now know is directed against aquaporin-4 – I’ll call it aquaporin-4 IgG – the criteria were revised. But there was a need to revise them. We became increasingly confident in this diagnostic biomarker, and it was possible to make an earlier diagnosis, often after the very first symptom. So that was one key driving factor. And furthermore, with the advent of this biomarker, we’ve appreciated that the spectrum of this disease is far broader than we had previously recognized. And there are a number of clinical syndromes that were previously not recognized as being part of the neuromyelitis optica spectrum that we now know are, and those needed to be integrated. Another key factor was the fact that a number patients that we recognize have this same condition now did not meet the old criteria. For example, you had to have both optic neuritis and myelitis to make this diagnosis, and we recognize some patients with this condition have just recurrent myelitis or just recurrent optic neuritis; they wouldn’t have satisfied the criteria. So those were the key reasons that drove developing new criteria. MSDF What are some of the new criteria? Dr. Weinshenker The first important point is that we’ve eliminated distinction between neuromyelitis optica – that is, having optic neuritis and myelitis – and having some of these more limited forms or unusual forms of the disease with brain lesions. And we’ve used the term neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder to refer to all of them. Second aspect of the diagnostic criteria is that we’ve stratified them based on whether or not you have this biomarker, the aquaporin-4 IgG. And we’ve separately defined patients with that biomarker and those without, the largest group being those with the biomarker. So in the patients with this biomarker, we really require only one clinical syndrome. The clinical criteria are very, very liberal, and we don’t even require, say, for myelitis, as we had before, we used to require having a long spinal cord lesion. We now recognize that about 10 to 20% of patients do not have those kind of long spinal cord lesions when they have a myelitis, so we no longer require it if you have that biomarker. But we’ve left open a category that we call seronegative neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, because some patients who meet all of the various clinical criteria’s, even the strictest clinical criteria, seem to be seronegative for this biomarker. We recognize that’s a heterogeneous group of patients; some of them ultimately will become seropositive. In some of those patients, we’re recognizing other antibodies that seem to be associated with a similar clinical syndrome, so I think, ultimately, we may create new silos based on those biomarkers, but when these criteria were developed, it was felt to be premature to include other antibodies as diagnostic biomarkers. So we’ve grouped them into this group of seronegative NMO spectrum disorder. But we’re much more strict in that category. We do require two clinical syndromes – two different clinical syndromes – and in some situations we do require additional MRI criteria in order to meet those criteria. MSDF Okay, because it was sounding like you were being so liberal about it people could lack this symptom and that symptom and antibody, but, in this case, if they’re lacking antibody, they need other criteria to qualify. Dr. Weinshenker That’s correct; both clinical and radiologic criteria. And we also have exclusionary – well, I shouldn’t say exclusionary. There are no exclusionary criteria. We refer to them as red flags. If you have certain characteristics that would make it more likely that you have MS, which is the major competing diagnosis, or if you have certain comorbidities like, say, cancer or sarcoidosis – we know sarcoidosis can sometimes mimic neuromyelitis optica – we add that as a note of caution, but strictly, no criteria is considered exclusionary for a diagnosis of neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder. MSDF Would other systemic autoimmune states also fall into the category of red flags: we’re going to have to decide whether it really is NMO or not? Dr. Weinshenker Actually, that used to be excluded by some people that if patients had systemic lupus or Sjögren's disease they were excluded, but we recognize that patients with neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder have an excess of those other autoimmune diseases. We very frequently detect comorbid disease, so we actually say that, say, a diagnosis of lupus or Sjögren's actually increases the chances that his patient has neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder if they present, say, with optic neuritis or myelitis. The old literature was replete with patients who were described as having lupus myelitis. Actually the majority of those patients actually have comorbid neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder. So it’s no longer an exclusionary criterion. MSDF There used to be a requirement for bilateral optic nerve involvement? Is that right? Has that gone by the wayside? Dr. Weinshenker Yes, this is before there were actually formal criteria, but yes, that was considered to be, say, a red flag that you might be dealing with neuromyelitis optica compared to standard MS. We recognize that that applies to a relatively small percentage of patients, so it doesn’t really appear in these current diagnostic criteria, but certainly it would not exclude it. And I would say that it does add to the suspicion that someone has neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder compared to MS. MSDF What about pediatric neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder? Dr. Weinshenker We did have several people, who were pediatrics experts, on our international panel and, in general, it was felt that the same criteria that we’ve applied to adults can be applied to children. We do recognize that certain brain syndromes are relatively more common in children, and there is one caveat, that is, in pediatric multiple sclerosis, sometimes patients will have long spinal cord lesions, and that’s one of the criteria that adds to the suspicion that somebody has NMO spectrum disorder as to MS. It may be somewhat less reliable in children. MSDF Is there any confounding or concern about ADEM in children? Dr. Weinshenker Well, neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder can be associated with brain lesions that can be interpreted as ADEM. They can be large, tumefactive, extensive. Brain biopsy, which is not part of the criteria that we use for neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, can sometimes differentiate ADEM – standard ADEM – from the ADEM-like lesions that occur in neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, so yes, it can be a diagnostic problem. But generally speaking, if one relies on the other criteria – the presence of optic neuritis and myelitis, which can occur in both ADEM and neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder – usually one can come to a clinical diagnosis. But there are some situations that can be confusing and occasionally additional tools, even brain biopsy, can be necessary to make a definitive diagnosis. MSDF If serologic testing is not available, do you still require the two other criteria to make the diagnosis? Dr. Weinshenker We propose that, for now, if serologic testing is not available – and there aren’t many places in the world where it’s strictly unavailable; it is offered worldwide – that you rely on the criteria for the seronegative and satisfy those criteria of seronegative NMO spectrum disorder. MSDF Are the criteria fairly straightforward that any neurologist up-to-speed can interpret them and use them clinically? Dr. Weinshenker Yes. We have designed these so that they can be used by neurologists in standard practice. Obviously, they don’t cover every single possibility, and there are complex patients where consultation will be necessary, but these are designed to be as good any diagnostic criteria can be. I think one has to realize that diagnostic criteria are for typical patients with conditions, and there are rare situations in difficult-to-interpret situations where one does need this kind of consultation. MSDF What about other historical terminology, and what kind of recommendations have you made vis-à-vis that? Dr. Weinshenker This has been a confusing element of the literature. For example, one term used in Asia, where it was recognized that you can have a relapsing condition that primarily targets the optic nerves and spinal cord was often referred to as Asian or Japanese opticospinal MS. And historically, this has been a very important contribution. I think our colleagues in Asia were the first to recognize that this relapsing condition was distinct from MS and may be something different, but the terminology was confusing. It was called opticospinal MS. Was this MS or something distinct from MS? And was it the same as neuromyelitis optica? And the panel felt that this term is no longer useful in clinical practice, and it doesn’t distinguish from multiple sclerosis. So it was felt all of those patients could be probably put into either the NMO spectrum disorder category or multiple sclerosis category, proposed that, for clinical practice, that terminology be eliminated. MSDF This is a good way to make the diagnoses, but it leads into the question of then what do you do? And next week’s podcast will focus on new clinical approaches to looking at NMO. [transition music] Thank you for listening to Episode Seventy of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I’m Dan Keller. [outro music]

Full Transcript [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Sixty-Seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. We’ll hear from Neda Razaz, a doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, on her research looking at what it means for child development when a parent has MS. The findings may help parents and health care professionals define strategies and services for children when needed.  First, let’s check out a few of the 70 new research papers we found in the last week. You cn see each week’s list of curated papers at msdiscovery.org. There’s a large and confusing cast of players in demyelinating diseases, such as MS and neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorders. But if the central nervous system was a stage set in a spaghetti Western movie, at least everyone knows the bad guys wearing black hats would be the T cells, right? Hold your horses, say the German and U.S. authors of a review paper in the journal Trends in Immunology. New findings in the last year reframe the story. Some T cells wear white hats. In fact, the central nervous system may need T cells to limit opportunistic infection, inflammation, and damage. Some MS drugs may work by redirecting T cell behavior. Side effects of other MS drugs may come from blanket suppression of all T cells. Now is the time to cue the theme from the movie Jaws. In the history of life on Earth, the kind of myelin that researchers are trying to protect and restore in people with MS and related disorders first showed up in a family of shark-like fish and skates and rays. The first true myelin basic protein seems to have originated in this family of cartilaginous fish, called chondrichthyans, or their ancestors. This information comes from an article in a special issue on myelin evolution in the journal Brain Research. A third paper that caught our attention looks at modern myelin. Almost every cell in the body has little energy packs called mitochondria. That’s true with brain cells, including the oligodendrocytes that make the myelin membrane that wraps around axons. Researchers from Norway say they have shown, for the first time, mitochondria moving into the myelin wrap. They also report that oligodendrocyte mitochondria are smaller, slower, and move less often than those in astrocytes and neurons. Now, to our drug development database. The drugs with important updates this week are fingolimod, glatiramer acetate, interferon beta-1a, mitoxantrone, and natalizumab. One update summarizes a press release indicating that a generic version of fingolimod has been launched in Russia. [transition music] And now to our interview. The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has a strong program in MS. We spoke with several of their researchers at the ECTRIMS meeting in Barcelona last fall. Today Neda Razaz, a PhD candidate, fills us in on her work on the impact of living with a parent with MS on child development or wellbeing Interviewee – Neda Razaz I study a group of parents with MS and their children, and we actually use health administrative databases to capture our cohort of interest. Interviewer – Dan Keller And what were the outcomes of interest, and how did you assess them? Razaz So, for one particular study that was actually published recently, we were interested in child developmental outcome at kindergarten. So I used the Early Child development instrument, which is a routinely collected database by kindergarten teachers in their classroom. And the specific instrument measured children’s wellbeing from social, emotional, and physical wellbeing. And that was our outcome of interest for that particular study. MSDF What did you find? Razaz I actually found that children who have a parent with MS were doing as well as children without a parental MS, so having a parent with MS was not associated with adverse developmental outcome. MDSF Was any aspect of parental mental health associated with children’s outcomes? Razaz Actually, yes. In the study, when we did a sensitivity analysis, we found that, in parents who had mental health condition, children were at higher risk of developing some adverse developmental outcomes, specifically in their social and emotional domains of their development. MSDF Could you tell if these parental mental health aspects had anything to do with the MS Razaz We didn’t specifically look at that, but it is very well-known in the literature that mental health is highly associated with MS. So we kind of feel that it’s not the MS particular; it’s the comorbidities that come with MS that might have an impact on the child. MSDF Did it matter whether it was the father or the mother with the issues? Razaz We did look at gender specifics, and in one study we did find that having a father with MS who had a coexisting mental health morbidity was also having an impact on child developmental outcome. Specifically for the fathers, it was their emotional wellbeing. But, however, for most of our studies we probably didn’t have enough fathers to be able to see a meaningful difference. MSDF Could you get a handle on alcohol use? Razaz No, I – we didn’t specifically at that, no. MSDF In the case of maternal MS, did it matter whether the disease was present during pregnancy, or if it arose sometime later in childhood development? Razaz We didn’t specifically examine the timing of the maternal MS onset, so I can’t comment on that specifically, but our inclusion criteria was that MS had to occur some time before the child reached five years of age. And 60% of our MS cohort had their first onset of MS after their pregnancy MSDF Does that give you any clue into the child’s duration of exposure to these issues? Razaz We did look at that, and in one study we found that there was a significant association between the duration of the child’s exposure to parental MS and adverse developmental outcome. And I actually feel that’s a very important question, and I’m exploring this further in my future studies as well. MSDF Can you put this into context? How does it compare to parental issues in other diseases? Razaz Some of our findings are broadly consistent with other chronic illnesses and is actually a specific meta-analysis looking at children who have parents with medical illnesses found that, overall, these children higher rates of internalizing behavior such as anxiety, depression, compared to children who don’t have parents with MS. However, most of these studies, their study population were adolescents, and it’s kind of different from ours kindergarten-aged children. So that might explain some of the differences in the findings that we found. So maybe being that young, at age five, is too early to have any impacts. And also maybe the parents with MS, their disease is not as advanced MSDF Are you or someone else going to follow these children as they age?   Razaz I am interested in actually – you know, my future studies I would like to do a longitudinal study of following these children until older ages; so at least until the time they are 18, and see whether they have a different rates of mental health disorder compared to children who don’t have a parent with MS. I’m interested in, like, specifically living with a parent with a chronic illness. MSDF What are the implications of your findings, and can you make any recommendations? Razaz While other studies are needed to confirm our findings, we believe that health professional need to be aware of the effect of mental health morbidity that is commonly associated with MS and its impact on their families. And we believe that mental illness such as anxiety and depression among MS patients should suggest the need for appropriate support for their children, because these children seem to be at higher risk of having some adverse developmental outcomes. MSDF What have we missed or is important to add? Razaz So I just want to say that these studies represent the first important steps in making a difference in MS. We are describing and exploring association, however; we and others in the field need to know if intervention at any way can make a real difference in the lives of parents and their kids. MSDF Whom would the intervention involve? Razaz The intervention should be family-centered intervention, having the MS patient and also the other parent and other children in the household. So it shouldn’t be individualistic, and it should be the whole family as well. MSDF Very good! I appreciate it. Thanks. Razaz Thank you very much. MSDF Two months after this interview, in late December, the findings were published in the journal Multiple Sclerosis. The paper is free and open to non-subscribers, and you can find a link to it on the podcast page on msdiscovery.org. There you can also find links to be papers and drug development database. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Sixty-Seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller. [outro music]

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Sixty-Three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. We’ve just passed the winter solstice. What better time than the shortest daylight hours of the year to check in with research at the University of British Columbia on sunlight and MS? Today we talk with Dr. Helen Tremlett who is exploring sun exposure over a person’s life course and how that syncs with their MS risk and disease course. In the weekly papers section on the MS Discovery Forum, this week’s list includes nearly 150 newly published research reports that could lead to better understanding and treatment of MS and related disorders. We selected four papers as editor’s picks. In one paper, researchers think they may have the first experimental evidence that MS may start with damage or loss of myelin-making cells in the brain and spinal cord. In this new mouse model of progressive MS, experimentally damaged brain cells make it hard for the mice to walk. The mice recover when their brain cells repair on their own. Six months later, the MS-like disease returns. In the study, the team showed that nanoparticles targeting the autoimmune reaction prevent the second phase of the disease. The study shows support for an “inside-out” model of MS. That’s different from the “outside-in” model, in which some aspect about the immune system goes wrong and then initiates the attack on myelin-making cells. The paper is published in Nature Neuroscience by collaborating researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. To grow and be healthy, all human cells need a signaling molecule named mTOR, named for the mammalian target of rapamycin. That’s true for myelin-making cells, or oligodendrocytes, as listeners may remember from an earlier podcast interview with Dr. Wendy Macklin. The ability to make myelin seems to depend on a key part known as mTOR complex 1, also called its raptor subunit. In a very basic advance, scientists have determined the atomic architecture of the raptor, or mTORC1, piece. The details are reported in the journal Science and provide a structural basis for studying mTORC1 function. In another editor’s pick, a review of cases of pediatric neuromyelitis optica, or NMO, showed that new international diagnostic guidelines applied well to children. Unfortunately, they also found that children with NMO have delayed treatment and worse short-term outcomes compared to those with MS. The authors urged immediate adoption of the guidelines to select the best treatment and improve outcomes. In the fourth editor’s pick, researchers found a potential new target to protect axons in a mouse model of neurodegeneration in multiple sclerosis. The target is a pore in the mitochondria, the cellular battery that provides energy. They designed a molecule to block the pore and showed it helped protect neurons and improved the mice’s mobility, all with minimal immunosuppression. The paper by mostly UK researchers is published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Now, let’s take a look at the latest Drug Development Pipeline updates. The drugs with important additions and changes are dimethyl fumarate, fingolimod, glatiramer acetate, natalizumab, and rituximab. One update reflects findings from post-hoc analysis of clinical trial data showing that the positive effects of fingolimod are apparent quite soon –within months – after initiation of treatment. [transition music] And now to our interview. I spoke with Professor Helen Tremlett, Canada research chair in neuroepidemiology and multiple sclerosis at the University of British Columbia when we were at the ECTRIMS conference in Barcelona in October. She has been studying sun exposure over the course of the lifetime and its relation to MS risk. While MS may affect an individual's likelihood to go out in the sun, studies may also need to consider the influence of sun exposure before the disease develops. Interviewer – Dan Keller What are you doing in this area? Interviewee – Helen Tremlett So I was presenting at ECTRIMS yesterday on a really interesting study based out of the Nurses' Health Study, and this was a collaboration from my group in Vancouver and Harvard School of Public Health; and that's Alberto Ascherio's group and Sandy Munger. So we were looking at sun exposure over the life course and associations with multiple sclerosis. So here we were looking at both aspects of the spectrum, if you can imagine; we were looking at sun exposure and future risk of multiple sclerosis, but also once an individual has developed multiple sclerosis, we were looking at the impact that potentially has on an individual in terms of their propensity to go outdoors in the daylight hours, outdoors in the sun. MSDF Right. So it may be the cart is before the horse in that sense; not that sun exposure is causing it, but their disability is causing less sun exposure? Dr. Tremlett We were looking at both sides of the equation. And I think it is important, particularly in a disease such as MS where onset of MS is a little bit fuzzy, I think, to look at sun exposure of the life course is important, and certainly our findings are indicating that. Because you want to know sunlight exposure in MS risk, but you also want to know, once someone's developed multiple sclerosis, how that influences their behavior outdoors and what implications that has if you're then trying to design the study to look at what causes MS. You need to be really careful who you recruit, because if that person has already changed their behavior, then that may influence your findings, and you're not then actually looking at what causes MS at all, you're just looking at a consequence of the disease. So I guess that's the first part of why we wanted to do that. And the second part is if having MS, if having a chronic condition, does influence your propensity or ability or desire to go outside, what consequence could that have for your health in terms of maybe your serum vitamin D levels or your melatonin levels, and that may have a consequence in terms of long-term health. MSDF You segmented people by where they were and at what ages. Dr. Tremlett It was pretty interesting. So, first of all, over ages 5 to 15, we found there that there was a 48% lower risk of MS for women living in high, relative to low, ambient UVB areas during their sort of childhood and early adolescent years. So that was pretty interesting. But we found, kind of to our surprise because it goes against other studies that are out there, we found that time spent outdoors in summer or winter wasn't significantly associated with MS risk in that age group, 5 to 15 years. But what we didn't realize is that it wasn't until we combined that outdoor behavior with the UVB, then we could see that there was an association. So we found that less time spent outdoors in summer in low ambient UVB areas—that was associated with a two-fold increased risk of multiple sclerosis. That was an important step for us; I mean, it might, you know, sound obvious to combine those two, but it was an important step because other studies in smaller geographical areas such as Tasmania, or there's a study out of Norway in a small region of Norway, they can find an association between time spent outdoors in summer/winter and MS risk. But I think we couldn't find it in the US, because the US is at such a diversity of latitudes – the study spanned over 14 US states – so it wasn't until we looked at that outdoor behavior in context of ambient UVB that we could find the association. And then, I suppose, our next step was to look at outdoor behavior over the life course. And this was really interesting, that we found some avoidance behavior was apparent in later life in multiple sclerosis. And maybe that comes as no surprise to people, but I think our numbers are interesting to put a concrete figure on it. So, for instance, by age 50, our MS cases were 60% less likely to report high relative to low outdoor exposure compared to controls, and that was in winter and in summer. So the bottom line is people with MS, once they have MS, are not going outside as much, so they're not getting that UVB exposure, so potentially they're not making that vitamin D and serum vitamin D. And then the winter exposure's important as well, because potentially they're not getting the same melatonin production and inhibition, and that may have a really important role in terms of immunology, the circadian rhythm and your sleep cycle, which, again, all knocks back into overall health and immunology of MS. And there have been some presentations actually at this conference looking into melatonin and its association with relapses in MS, and that's pretty interesting. MSDF There's even some emerging thought that sleep is essential for good brain function in terms of taking out the garbage – glymphatics and things like that. So melatonin disturbances may actually have some further consequences in an inflammatory brain disease. Dr. Tremlett And there's some interesting studies, not that we did but others have done, looking at shift work and risk of MS. And shift work may be associated with increased risk of MS. Maybe melatonin ties into that as well. MSDF Is there also potentially an effect, besides on vitamin D and melatonin, that sun exposure itself has an effect on the immune system, maybe suppressing it? Dr. Tremlett Yeah, modulating it in some way. No, absolutely. We don't really know the mechanism. I mean, the obvious one would be sun on human skin at the right time of year on the right skin color can result in really high levels of serum vitamin D being produced. Sunlight exposure the minute it actually hits the skin surface can have a direct immunomodulatory effect. And then, obvious, sun hitting the eye. Melatonin is one of the pathways in there that may then impact the immune system. MSDF Is it possible to make any conclusions or even recommendations at this point? Dr. Tremlett No. It's an observational study, and we do actually need to do more analysis on this group of individuals. The main recommendations we could make from this study is informing how to design future studies, and also two things you could take from this in terms of recommendations. First of all, we saw sun avoidance behavior in individuals once they've developed multiple sclerosis. That's really important because it really means that if you want to look at what is causing MS, do not take serum vitamin D levels or look at skin cancer risk, for instance, in individuals who already have MS, because they've already changed in compare to controls, adding further somehow differences are related to what causes MS, because these individuals have already changed their behavior because they've got a chronic disease. So that's the first statement, which might be a no-brainer for some people, but it's amazing how many studies are still published like that in the MS literature at the moment. And I suppose the second piece is trying to understand if we are going to do an interventional study, what time period in an individual's life or within a population do you need to target in order to change the course and prevent the disease from occurring? And we're trying to understand that more, looking beyond the window age 5 to 15, look more into adulthood to see if ambient UVB is associated with MS risk later in life and into adulthood. And others have shown that there does seem to be an association even into adulthood, which is exciting because if you do want to do an intervention study, then you haven't necessarily missed the boat because you've not intervened during childhood. But, I mean, the real question is how do you intervene and what with? And that's another topic in itself. MSDF We'll leave that for another day. Thank you. Dr. Tremlett Thank you very much. [transition music] Next week, we'll continue our discussion with Professor Tremlett when she'll talk about her preliminary studies on pediatric MS patients and their gut microbiomes. Until then, thank you for listening to Episode Sixty-Three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This Podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller. [outro music]

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Sixty-Three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. We’ve just passed the winter solstice. What better time than the shortest daylight hours of the year to check in with research at the University of British Columbia on sunlight and MS? Today we talk with Dr. Helen Tremlett who is exploring sun exposure over a person’s life course and how that syncs with their MS risk and disease course. In the weekly papers section on the MS Discovery Forum, this week’s list includes nearly 150 newly published research reports that could lead to better understanding and treatment of MS and related disorders. We selected four papers as editor’s picks. In one paper, researchers think they may have the first experimental evidence that MS may start with damage or loss of myelin-making cells in the brain and spinal cord. In this new mouse model of progressive MS, experimentally damaged brain cells make it hard for the mice to walk. The mice recover when their brain cells repair on their own. Six months later, the MS-like disease returns. In the study, the team showed that nanoparticles targeting the autoimmune reaction prevent the second phase of the disease. The study shows support for an “inside-out” model of MS. That’s different from the “outside-in” model, in which some aspect about the immune system goes wrong and then initiates the attack on myelin-making cells. The paper is published in Nature Neuroscience by collaborating researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. To grow and be healthy, all human cells need a signaling molecule named mTOR, named for the mammalian target of rapamycin. That’s true for myelin-making cells, or oligodendrocytes, as listeners may remember from an earlier podcast interview with Dr. Wendy Macklin. The ability to make myelin seems to depend on a key part known as mTOR complex 1, also called its raptor subunit. In a very basic advance, scientists have determined the atomic architecture of the raptor, or mTORC1, piece. The details are reported in the journal Science and provide a structural basis for studying mTORC1 function. In another editor’s pick, a review of cases of pediatric neuromyelitis optica, or NMO, showed that new international diagnostic guidelines applied well to children. Unfortunately, they also found that children with NMO have delayed treatment and worse short-term outcomes compared to those with MS. The authors urged immediate adoption of the guidelines to select the best treatment and improve outcomes. In the fourth editor’s pick, researchers found a potential new target to protect axons in a mouse model of neurodegeneration in multiple sclerosis. The target is a pore in the mitochondria, the cellular battery that provides energy. They designed a molecule to block the pore and showed it helped protect neurons and improved the mice’s mobility, all with minimal immunosuppression. The paper by mostly UK researchers is published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Now, let’s take a look at the latest Drug Development Pipeline updates. The drugs with important additions and changes are dimethyl fumarate, fingolimod, glatiramer acetate, natalizumab, and rituximab. One update reflects findings from post-hoc analysis of clinical trial data showing that the positive effects of fingolimod are apparent quite soon –within months – after initiation of treatment. [transition music] And now to our interview. I spoke with Professor Helen Tremlett, Canada research chair in neuroepidemiology and multiple sclerosis at the University of British Columbia when we were at the ECTRIMS conference in Barcelona in October. She has been studying sun exposure over the course of the lifetime and its relation to MS risk. While MS may affect an individual's likelihood to go out in the sun, studies may also need to consider the influence of sun exposure before the disease develops. Interviewer – Dan Keller What are you doing in this area? Interviewee – Helen Tremlett So I was presenting at ECTRIMS yesterday on a really interesting study based out of the Nurses' Health Study, and this was a collaboration from my group in Vancouver and Harvard School of Public Health; and that's Alberto Ascherio's group and Sandy Munger. So we were looking at sun exposure over the life course and associations with multiple sclerosis. So here we were looking at both aspects of the spectrum, if you can imagine; we were looking at sun exposure and future risk of multiple sclerosis, but also once an individual has developed multiple sclerosis, we were looking at the impact that potentially has on an individual in terms of their propensity to go outdoors in the daylight hours, outdoors in the sun. MSDF Right. So it may be the cart is before the horse in that sense; not that sun exposure is causing it, but their disability is causing less sun exposure? Dr. Tremlett We were looking at both sides of the equation. And I think it is important, particularly in a disease such as MS where onset of MS is a little bit fuzzy, I think, to look at sun exposure of the life course is important, and certainly our findings are indicating that. Because you want to know sunlight exposure in MS risk, but you also want to know, once someone's developed multiple sclerosis, how that influences their behavior outdoors and what implications that has if you're then trying to design the study to look at what causes MS. You need to be really careful who you recruit, because if that person has already changed their behavior, then that may influence your findings, and you're not then actually looking at what causes MS at all, you're just looking at a consequence of the disease. So I guess that's the first part of why we wanted to do that. And the second part is if having MS, if having a chronic condition, does influence your propensity or ability or desire to go outside, what consequence could that have for your health in terms of maybe your serum vitamin D levels or your melatonin levels, and that may have a consequence in terms of long-term health. MSDF You segmented people by where they were and at what ages. Dr. Tremlett It was pretty interesting. So, first of all, over ages 5 to 15, we found there that there was a 48% lower risk of MS for women living in high, relative to low, ambient UVB areas during their sort of childhood and early adolescent years. So that was pretty interesting. But we found, kind of to our surprise because it goes against other studies that are out there, we found that time spent outdoors in summer or winter wasn't significantly associated with MS risk in that age group, 5 to 15 years. But what we didn't realize is that it wasn't until we combined that outdoor behavior with the UVB, then we could see that there was an association. So we found that less time spent outdoors in summer in low ambient UVB areas—that was associated with a two-fold increased risk of multiple sclerosis. That was an important step for us; I mean, it might, you know, sound obvious to combine those two, but it was an important step because other studies in smaller geographical areas such as Tasmania, or there's a study out of Norway in a small region of Norway, they can find an association between time spent outdoors in summer/winter and MS risk. But I think we couldn't find it in the US, because the US is at such a diversity of latitudes – the study spanned over 14 US states – so it wasn't until we looked at that outdoor behavior in context of ambient UVB that we could find the association. And then, I suppose, our next step was to look at outdoor behavior over the life course. And this was really interesting, that we found some avoidance behavior was apparent in later life in multiple sclerosis. And maybe that comes as no surprise to people, but I think our numbers are interesting to put a concrete figure on it. So, for instance, by age 50, our MS cases were 60% less likely to report high relative to low outdoor exposure compared to controls, and that was in winter and in summer. So the bottom line is people with MS, once they have MS, are not going outside as much, so they're not getting that UVB exposure, so potentially they're not making that vitamin D and serum vitamin D. And then the winter exposure's important as well, because potentially they're not getting the same melatonin production and inhibition, and that may have a really important role in terms of immunology, the circadian rhythm and your sleep cycle, which, again, all knocks back into overall health and immunology of MS. And there have been some presentations actually at this conference looking into melatonin and its association with relapses in MS, and that's pretty interesting. MSDF There's even some emerging thought that sleep is essential for good brain function in terms of taking out the garbage – glymphatics and things like that. So melatonin disturbances may actually have some further consequences in an inflammatory brain disease. Dr. Tremlett And there's some interesting studies, not that we did but others have done, looking at shift work and risk of MS. And shift work may be associated with increased risk of MS. Maybe melatonin ties into that as well. MSDF Is there also potentially an effect, besides on vitamin D and melatonin, that sun exposure itself has an effect on the immune system, maybe suppressing it? Dr. Tremlett Yeah, modulating it in some way. No, absolutely. We don't really know the mechanism. I mean, the obvious one would be sun on human skin at the right time of year on the right skin color can result in really high levels of serum vitamin D being produced. Sunlight exposure the minute it actually hits the skin surface can have a direct immunomodulatory effect. And then, obvious, sun hitting the eye. Melatonin is one of the pathways in there that may then impact the immune system. MSDF Is it possible to make any conclusions or even recommendations at this point? Dr. Tremlett No. It's an observational study, and we do actually need to do more analysis on this group of individuals. The main recommendations we could make from this study is informing how to design future studies, and also two things you could take from this in terms of recommendations. First of all, we saw sun avoidance behavior in individuals once they've developed multiple sclerosis. That's really important because it really means that if you want to look at what is causing MS, do not take serum vitamin D levels or look at skin cancer risk, for instance, in individuals who already have MS, because they've already changed in compare to controls, adding further somehow differences are related to what causes MS, because these individuals have already changed their behavior because they've got a chronic disease. So that's the first statement, which might be a no-brainer for some people, but it's amazing how many studies are still published like that in the MS literature at the moment. And I suppose the second piece is trying to understand if we are going to do an interventional study, what time period in an individual's life or within a population do you need to target in order to change the course and prevent the disease from occurring? And we're trying to understand that more, looking beyond the window age 5 to 15, look more into adulthood to see if ambient UVB is associated with MS risk later in life and into adulthood. And others have shown that there does seem to be an association even into adulthood, which is exciting because if you do want to do an intervention study, then you haven't necessarily missed the boat because you've not intervened during childhood. But, I mean, the real question is how do you intervene and what with? And that's another topic in itself. MSDF We'll leave that for another day. Thank you. Dr. Tremlett Thank you very much. [transition music] Next week, we'll continue our discussion with Professor Tremlett when she'll talk about her preliminary studies on pediatric MS patients and their gut microbiomes. Until then, thank you for listening to Episode Sixty-Three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This Podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller. [outro music]

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Sixty-One of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m Dan Keller. In this podcast, Dr. Yanming Wang of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, discusses a solution to the vexing problem of how to track changes in myelin in the brain and spinal cord, a measurement believed to be especially important for new candidate drugs to restore this insulating sheathing around axons. First, here are some new items in the MS Discovery Forum. A new data visualization showcases the collaborations among authors who published papers reporting the results of clinical trials in progressive forms of multiple sclerosis in the last 30 years. You can find the network map on msdiscovery.org under “Research Resources.” You can mouse over circles in the graphic to find researchers' names. Click and drag the circles to animate the map and reveal connections. In research news, a Swedish team took the first steps toward finding potential disease markers in the immune cells of asymptomatic people with MS and with seasonal allergies. The study pinpointed three key proteins that may transform normally protective T cells into ones that attack myelin in the case of MS. The three proteins are transcription factors, which glom on to DNA and control which genes turn on and off. According to data from genome studies, the proteins are more common in genetic regions associated with disease, strengthening the case for their role in MS. Finally, the three proteins act differently in people with immune-related diseases, including multiple sclerosis, according to tests on blood samples. Ultimately, the researchers want to learn if they can detect multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune conditions much earlier. [transition music] And now to our interview. MSDF caught up with Dr. Yanming Wang last month at the 2015 World Congress of Neurology meeting in Santiago, Chile. We discussed his solution to what has been a missing link in MS research and practice; that is, how to image myelin -- not just lesions on an MRI, but how to tag the substance itself using a biomarker for molecular imaging called M-E-D-A-S, or "mee-das." Going beyond diagnosis, Dr. Wang told us it may eventually allow clinicians to get a better handle on disease progression and efficacy of treatments. Interviewer – Dan Keller You had referred to molecular imaging of myelin as the missing link. Why is this the missing link? Interviewee – Yanming Wang Because molecular imaging has really transformed how we practice medicine today, and it has become a standard care for virtually many neurological diseases. However, in multiple sclerosis, there's still no effective imaging technique in place that can help physicians to monitor not just for diagnosis, but also to monitor the disease progression. MSDF And would this be useful also in monitoring potential therapies? Dr. Wang Exactly. There's a lack of imaging technique that allow people to monitor the drug efficacy, particularly for those drugs that try to repair the myelin damage in the CNS. MSDF How would this differ from MRI imaging, what you see there, versus having a radioactive biomarker? Dr. Wang Currently, MRI is the commonly used imaging modality in MS, however MRI provides only anatomical information and also detect brain lesions. However, those lesions detected on MRI are not specific for myelin pathology. MSDF You do have a compound now, [11C]MeDAS, which would be specific for myelin. Is that right, is it very specific for myelin? Dr. Wang Exactly. It's very specific for myelin, because the advantage it has over MRI is that that is truly a molecular imaging modality which uses myelin-specific radiotracers that allow to quantitatively monitor the myelin damage and myelin distribution in the brain. So for this reason, we developed a specific radiotracer that can selectively bind to myelin with high affinity, so that we could directly image the myelin distribution. MSDF How quickly does it reach the CNS and you can image? Dr. Wang It takes minutes, literally, for the radiotracer to penetrate the BBB and enter the brain, and then the whole process takes only 60 minutes. MSDF Can you briefly describe your rat model where you're using lysolecithin as an MS model, and then what you did with your marker? Dr. Wang Lysolecithin model is an established model of focal demyelination in the brain, so we used that model to test our compounds to monitor the demyelination and remyelination. So after injection of MeDAS, the compounds could readily enter the brain and selectively bind to the myelin. And then at the peak of the disease, which is a peak of the demyelination, the brain uptake of the compounds is lowest, versus when the brain is recovered, then the brain uptake of the compounds is increased. So this demonstrated the in vivo specificity of the radiotracer for myelin. MSDF And you can image myelin on the way down and on the way up; you have this hepatocyte growth factor which causes some remyelination? Dr. Wang Right, exactly. In collaboration with my colleague, Bob Miller. So we'd use this imaging modality to see if we can monitor the drug efficacy for remyelination. So we'd give this HGF, which is a growth factor that promotes remyelination, and then we could use this imaging technique just to monitor the increase of remyelination after the drug treatment. MSDF Everything right now is in animals. Do you have plans for any human trials? Dr. Wang Yes, we are working on this paperwork required by FDA to put these compounds in humans. MSDF Is the compound so far nontoxic; it's diamino stilbene, is that right? Does it have any estrogenic effects or other toxic effects? Dr. Wang No. We have done systematic toxicity studies and there's any adverse effects in animal models so far. MSDF What do you see as the clinical utility of this if it enters the human realm? Dr. Wang It's going to be a very powerful tool for diagnosis and prognosis, and also particularly for evaluation of drug efficacy. As you know, currently pharmaceutical companies and academic investigators are all trying to develop new drugs that can repair myelin damage in order to restore the biological functions. However, there's a lack of imaging tools in place that allow them to monitor such myelin repair therapies, and this could provide the missing link for this endeavor. MSDF Does PET imaging with this compound correlate at all with what's seen on MRI, especially in a kinetic sense following time course? Dr. Wang Well, yes. In the wonderful publication in Annual Neurology a couple years ago, we did demonstrate that this PET imaging technique can be used as an imaging marker that correlates with the disease progression in terms of the severity of the symptoms in animal models, in the EAE models. The EAE rat, for example, its appearance, the relapsing or remitting stage, and that we could use this imaging marker to correlate nicely with the symptoms. And this is one of important application if we put this into clinical use. MSDF Is this compound the end-all and be-all, or are you developing others, or have some gone by the wayside for various reasons? Dr. Wang This compound, and also this imaging technique, could be used not just only in MS, but can also be used in many other neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, spinal cord injury, and stroke, for example, because all of these neurological diseases are associated to some degree with the myelin damage. MSDF Have we missed anything important, anything to add? Dr. Wang Again, I think the imaging technique, particularly molecular imaging technique based on positron emission tomography, is lagged behind in the field of neurological diseases because of the complexities of the brain and the lack of molecular probes that could advance our understanding, also facilitate the drug discovery. MSDF I appreciate it. Thank you. Dr. Wang Oh, thank you very much then. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Sixty-One of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This Podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller. [outro music]

[intro music]  Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Fifty-Nine of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller. In our previous podcast, you heard about a group of leading MS researchers and clinicians calling for a big change in improving care for people with MS. The new report, called Brain Health – Time Matters in MS, makes the case for a therapeutic strategy to minimize disease activity. The report advises early diagnosis and treatment, and regular monitoring of disease activity. The report urges patients, physicians, health care payers, and policy makers to support the goal of life-long brain health. In this podcast, another one of the report authors, Dr. Helmut Butzkueven, talks about what the new treatment target means for patients and their doctors in the real world. This is one of our extra podcasts from the big MS meeting in Barcelona talking about ways that evidence from research can be translated now into better MS outcomes But first, here are some new items in the MS Discovery Forum. Every week, MSDF lists the latest scientific papers on MS and related disorders, with links to the abstracts on PubMed. Of more than 110 new studies published last week, we selected three as editor’s picks. MS has been traditionally viewed as a T cell–driven disease, but a new paper from Canadian researchers introduces another villain—a rogue type of B cell in people with MS that may fuel inflammation in two ways. This may be why general B cell depletion seems to work so well in MS and may lead to more targeted treatments. In a new twist on dietary fat and autoimmune disease, German researchers report that certain fats work through gut microbes to exert both good and bad effects. In mice, they found certain fats were protective against inflammatory fats. They have moved on to testing in healthy humans and hope to study the impact in people with MS. A cost-effectiveness study from Spain says do not judge a drug by its price alone. Glatiramer acetate may be more expensive than interferon-beta, but fewer relapses and reduced spasticity may make it more cost effective. Interesting, but you can be sure this fuller economic look will not be the last word on drug costs. [transition music] And now to our interview with Dr. Helmut Butzkueven, who directs the MS services at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Box Hill Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. We spoke with him at the recent European Committee for Treatment and Research in MS, or ECTRIMS, meeting in Barcelona about the Brain Health report that was launched at the meeting. The main thrust of the report – aimed at the broad MS community – is that time matters in MS. The report lays out several goals to maximize brain health over the lifetime. A critical one is early intervention. Interviewee – Helmut Butzkueven We know that early disease activity sets up long-term problems. However, early disease activity is often relatively silent to the eye. It’s not silent to the eye of the MRI machine and other monitoring tools that we have. So we would like clinicians and patients, not actually just in early disease, but starting right from the start to have a proactive monitoring approach to jointly assess their disease activity and take action if things are not going well. Interviewer – Dan Keller How much of an emergency is it? If someone finds out they have a cancer diagnosis, they rush to a surgeon, oftentimes. If they find out they have high cholesterol, they might take a year or two to decide to get on a statin. So what’s the time frame we’re talking about here? Dr. Butzkueven I think the appropriate time frame to think about is months, actually. We think that an MRI scan should be performed approximately every 12 months to assess disease activity, to assess how your current treatment is performing. So it’s not seconds or minutes; thankfully, multiple sclerosis isn’t exactly like an acute stroke or a heart attack. But it’s also not a time, particularly early in the disease when you could be setting up these kind of strategies, to just leave people be. We need to, when we first see patients, articulate our monitoring goals. MSDF And how quickly should someone, when they’re referred and there’s a putative diagnosis, get that scan initially? Dr. Butzkueven As soon as possible. I mean, scans are crucial, obviously, for diagnosis – accurate diagnosis, as well as for setting up the monitoring phase, because the first scan can then be compared to the next scan, and so on. MSDF What other goals are there for treatment and management? Dr. Butzkueven The key things that we want to really focus on, apart from what we’ve already discussed which is early diagnosis and articulating a treatment and monitoring plan to maximize brain health, is a joint approach. So for people with MS and doctors to both be empowered to jointly manage the disease. So this includes, of course, increasing consultation time, giving people time to discuss their MS with their managing team. I think this kind of move away from paternalistic medicine, to empowering patients to be part of the management process to self-manage is hugely important. That’s just in step with the modern world. The other thing is more indirect. Across the world, we face huge differences in access to disease-modifying drugs. Some of us living in the United States and Australia in Germany, Switzerland are luckier than others. And we really need to provide evidence to government that disease-modifying drugs are worth funding. MSDF Or else what happens? Dr. Butzkueven Else people, and ultimately governments, incur the costs of markedly worse disability. MSDF To empower patients takes certain knowledge and, I suppose, permissions or rapport with the physician. And to empower the physician, I suppose, takes knowledge, evidence, consult. So are these two different things? Do they move in parallel, but they require different activity? Dr. Butzkueven Yes, they do. Of course they do. To some extent, changing practice in an interaction can come from either side of the interacting party, but certainly patients, on the whole, probably need to be more demanding. They need to have access to evidence, and I’m going to say something controversial, to actually help assess the clinical care that they are receiving. So people should say, for example, if this report, the evidence suggests that perhaps we should be doing something else. What do you think? Physicians, as I said, need to be strongly encouraged to have a priori a specific plan. If you were someone with MS, and we saw you for the first time in our clinic, we should be telling you what the goals are. We should be telling you what our scheme of monitoring is going to be to maximize your outcome, to maximize your brain health. MSDF What kind of a role can longitudinal databases play in changing policy? Dr. Butzkueven They’re really the only source of long-term data. MS is a disease which you’re going to have for decades, once you’re diagnosed with it, and it likely will cause you and your government very significant costs over that time. But those costs can only be measured if we measure those outcomes, and the only way to really measure them is longitudinally. So databases embedded in the real-world healthcare collecting just a minimum of information on as many MS patients as possible can be enormously powerful, doing the sums in the first place, actually understanding how much disability there is; how much can be prevented with appropriate treatment strategies; and, dare I say it, how much money government could save. MSDF MRIs are now a powerful tool. Other medical specialties have had all sorts of invasive measures in the past. You could take biopsies of skin, breast, prostate, liver. You never had an assessment tool this powerful, but now this one is fairly noninvasive. It’s completely noninvasive. What can it tell you? I mean, people look for lesions, but there’s much more to be derived. Dr. Butzkueven Yes, of course. Lesions is still a key outcome, but the other thing is brain shrinkage – brain atrophy. So we, increasingly, understand that people who are experiencing significant brain loss – brain tissue loss – early in their MS will do worse, in the long-term. So here we have another target for monitoring. And people might say, well, I do an MRI scan, but there are no lesion changes reported. There’s no volume changes reported. But this world is changing rapidly. Image recognition analysis tools are advancing very quickly. I predict, within two or three years, routine MRI will actually spit out these metrics for us. At the moment, a lot of reporting, unfortunately, in the world is still what we would call qualitative rather than quantitative. But we’re going to start seeing those numbers, and we need to be ready to act on them. MSDF How much faster does the brain, in an MS patient without treatment, atrophy or lose volume compared to an age-matched control? Dr. Butzkueven So this is a question that I can answer in two ways, I think, to illustrate the concept. I could say it’s five to seven times faster. What I’m talking about there is averages, medians if you like. What I should be saying is that it could be anything. Your trajectory, as an MS patient, could be exactly within the normal range, I mean, sadly – particularly over the age of 30 – all of us lose a bit of brain volume a year: 0.3%, 0.4%. In MS, that could be your trajectory, and that would be fantastic. On the other hand, you could the person losing 3%, 4% – 10 times, 15 times normal. And we could pick that within a year or two, and that is the time to intervene, not when that ultimately results five, six, ten years later in progressive disease. MSDF You’ve made the analogy of managing MS to a new car and its warranty. Can you tell me about that? Dr. Butzkueven I was really just trying to say that plans for keeping things well, keeping things in shape, are quite prominent in society. So this analogy is simple. You buy a new car. What you get with it is a service book. The service book gives you a plan for managing your car. At 6 months, there’ll be a little tire change, oil change; 12 months there’ll be a major service, and so on. And the thing is, as a customer, I mean, you buy the car. It’s already there. It’s the same thing. We want clinicians and patients to demand and to deliver a plan. This is how we’re going monitor your MS to maximize the health of your brain. MSDF So this is your 6 month service. This is your 12 month service. Dr. Butzkueven Exactly. So, for example, in might be we will see you every 6 months, and we’ll do a neurological examination. We might do a particular cognitive test. We will do a repeat MRI scan, ideally on the same machine, once a year. We will be looking for the following: we will take action if things are going badly. If things are going well, then we’re reassured. But we need people with MS to demand this, and we need clinicians to deliver these plans. MSDF I don’t mean to make light of the situation of having the disease, but I think people respond well to something they already know, like a service plan. Dr. Butzkueven Yes, sure. I guess that’s why I’m using that analogy. Maybe we should say we need a service plan for MS. MSDF Is there anything we’ve missed or important to add? Dr. Butzkueven Nothing. We’ve covered the key recommendations of the report: access to early diagnosis, consideration of early treatment, a service plan, empowerment of people with MS to actually have accurate information, and being empowered in shared decision-making, and finally, the health economics situation, powered by clinicians – more and more clinicians – collecting long-term outcomes data on people with MS. MSDF And the Brain Health report is freely available, and we will link to it. I appreciate it. Thank you. Dr. Butzkueven It’s a pleasure. Thank you for talking with me. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Fifty-Nine of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller. [outro music]

Reggie Gaudino is Vice President of Scientific Operations and the Director of Intellectual Property at Steep Hill, a national leader in cannabis science and technology. Reggie recently joined our host Shango Los for a conversation about the genetic patenting of specific cannabis strains, the future of cannabis breeding, and how the involvement of big agriculture is going to shift the landscape of the entire marijuana industry. For a full transcript: https://www.ganjapreneur.com/reggie-gaudino-patenting-strains-the-future-of-cannabis-intellectual-property/

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode 58 of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller. A group of people are calling for a big change in improving care for people with MS. There may be no cure for MS yet, but there are a lot of ways to improve their outcomes. In this podcast, one of the ringleaders, Dr. Gavin Giovannoni, talks about a new push to use long-term brain health as a goal in MS treatment. The new report, called Brain Health, makes the point that time matters in MS. The authors draw on more than 300 research studies to show evidence that brain tissue can be preserved with early and effective treatment, and regular monitoring of disease activity. The report urges patients, physicians, health care payers, and policy makers to support the goal of life-long brain health. This podcast gives you the main take-home points from the Brain Health initiative, launched at the recent MS meeting in Barcelona, Spain. We will have extra podcasts for you in the coming weeks about other ways that evidence from research can be translated now into better MS outcomes. But first, here are some new items in the MS Discovery Forum. In the discussion section, a team of graduate students wants to hear from people with MS and their families. The team is from Santa Clara University, located in the heart of Silicon Valley in California. They have a class project to design a software product to assist people impacted by MS. Help them out by completing their survey. Coming up on our meetings and events list is next week’s World Congress of Neurology in Santiago, Chile. MSDF will be there gathering new podcast interviews. If you, too, will be at the conference and would like to meet with us – or if you’re interested in being interviewed about your research for a future podcast – please email us at editor@msdiscovery.org. The meeting list includes many specialty conferences and seminars of all the different kinds of scientific expertise that goes into understanding MS, from immunology to myelin biology, genetics, and brain and spinal cord imaging. Please add your meetings, workshops, and seminars. This is just one of the ways that MSDF shares information across the many different specialty areas to advance treatments for MS. Help us by adding other MS-research-related events. It’s free to post. Our Drug-Development Pipeline contains 44 investigational and approved agents for MS. Last week, we added results from one new trial, we updated subject matter from four other trials, and we added eight other pieces of information to the database. One update summarizes findings gathered from a 15-year follow-up visit for participants in the PRISMS interferon beta-1a trial. [transition music] And now to our interview with Dr. Gavin Giovannoni, head of neurology at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry in the U.K. We spoke with him at the recent European Committee for Treatment and Research in MS, or ECTRIMS, meeting in Barcelona about the Brain Health report that was launched at the meeting. The main thrust of the report – aimed at a broad audience of MS community members – is that time matters in MS. Interviewer – Dan Keller In terms of the Brain Health report, can you give me a broad overview of what the intent was and what you hope to accomplish? Interviewee – Gavin Giovannoni I mean, the real issue is to try to raise awareness and use it as a platform for trying to get policy changed. And the target audience is just the MS community, as well as health care providers, payers, politicians, etc. And one of the things we’re beginning to realize now as we have more effective therapies, and we begin to learn more about MS, is that we are compromising the health of our patients by not treating them quickly enough or manage them quickly enough. I mean, there are large delays in patients being diagnosed, getting access to treatment, and when they’re on treatment, they’re not being monitored actively. And there’s now emerging data that if you’re on a therapy, and you’ve got ongoing disease activity, you don’t do very well in the long-term. So the idea is to try and encourage people to treat to a target, monitor, and escalate rapidly. So it’s really trying not to waste time, too, essentially. And we borrow the term, “Time is Brain” from “Time Matters” from the stroke, where we know that, you know, every minute counts. And we would like to get the attitude across to people who are treating MS that every week, every month counts. MSDF At the initial diagnosis, how quickly should things move along, scanning, treatment? Dr. Giovannoni I mean, we’ve got guidelines within our socialist healthcare system, the NHS, to get the diagnostic phase over with in a four-week period. If you’ve got the disease, it’s very anxiety-inducing, the whole process. In reality, you’d like to get it over with in days. And then you need to start the counseling and education process. And I think you can’t rush people onto therapy within days because the holistic approach is people got to understand their disease, the implications of the illness, the prognosis. They’ve got to come to terms with it as well before you can actually start discussing the implications of therapy, which may be life-long. So I’m not talking about this is like stroke – you have that thirteen minutes – I think you need to try and shorten the whole process and be active about it, not be passive. Most clinicians in the world now just monitor their patients clinically. They don’t monitor them with MRI scans. They just wait for them to break through. Sometimes they accept minor relapses as just being part of the disease, and I think now that we’ve got more effective therapies, we shouldn’t be accepting any breakthrough activity. We should be escalating people to more effective therapies. And the data is becoming really strong that active disease, in the form of relapses or MRI activity, does portend a poor prognosis, so you want to switch it off. MSDF The report laid out some specific goals. Can you delineate some of those? Dr. Giovannoni The main goal is speeding up the whole process, so a rapid diagnosis, rapid initiation of treatment, monitoring, rapid escalation or possibly even flipping the pyramid – if they’ve got a bad prognostic profile, give the more effective therapies. Also, collect data so by monitoring, you hopefully will change behavior. And then the other thing that’s hidden is the cost effectiveness of these treatments. So, we need to make systems available to provide these drugs at cost effective prices, particularly in countries that are resource poor. It’s fine talking about North America and Europe – relatively wealthy areas of the world – where we have insurance systems to pay for these expensive new emerging therapies. But if you just to any of the developing countries, people with the disease don’t have access to disease-modifying treatments. We’re just letting the disease run its natural course, and I find that very upsetting. There’s a whole literature and emerging dataset on brain health from, mainly, the dementia – Alzheimer's field – and some of it’s applicable to MS: getting patients to stop smoking; they must exercise regularly, try to avoid drugs that affect cognition, avoid excessive alcohol, sleep properly. Comorbidities must be managed actively. By that I mean hypertension, diabetes, etc. So there’s all that lifestyle, comorbidity issues that also need to be focused on. It’s basically making neurologists and healthcare professionals aware that there’s more to the brain in MS than just inflammation. We need to think of it holistically and take it seriously. MSDF What do you see as some of the barriers to implementing all these things that you’re recommending? Dr. Giovannoni The barriers I wish I could answer it easily. I mean, we know that there’s slow adoption of innovation. Certain fields are more slow at adopting innovation than others, and I think neurologists, intrinsically, are quite conservative. And up until we had therapies in MS, we were just diagnosticians and giving prognoses. Now that we’ve got treatments, we need to adapt to the fact that we’ve got therapies that can make a difference to people with MS. So the slow adoption is attitude, culture, and regulatory hurdles. There’s cost hurdles. Health insurance companies don’t pay for our monitoring, in large parts of the world, so you’re going to have to fight with them to be able to monitor with MRI scans. Patients themselves – try and nudge them to stop smoking and eat properly and exercise. It’s easier said than done. I mean, this is a global population issue, and you know, why should people with MS be any different to the general population. So it’s not easy. We need to think creatively about how we get this done. MSDF But it sounds like nihilism should be passé, if in the past, all you could do was diagnose and hope for the best. Now that’s really not the situation. Dr. Giovannoni Yes, but I think there’s another form of nihilism. And so in the past, we had therapeutic nihilism where we didn’t give any therapies. I think we’ve got a form of subliminal nihilism in the sense; we put people on less effective therapies. We’re not monitoring them, but their disease remains active. I call it smoldering MS. Unless we monitor with sensitive MRI techniques, possibly other monitoring, we’re not picking up the smoldering MS. And so I think we’re potentially leaving a whole generation of people with smoldering MS to obviously a better outcome than they would have had with no therapy, but not as good an outcome if they would be as connected to more effective therapies. So that the subliminal nihilism, I just thought about that term, it kind of captures what I’m trying to, because, you know, what we see affects behavior. If we don’t see it, we don’t change our behavior. So part of this report is to make people observe, measure, monitor. And if they see activity, hopefully, it’ll change their behavior. MSDF In so many specialties, people say, well, I don’t treat lab values. I don’t treat images. I treat patients. But in this case, it seems like you do intervene when there is an imaging change. Dr. Giovannoni Yes, because we now have data, so this has got to be evidence-driven. And we’re not saying every recommendation in the policy report’s got unclad evidence about it. There is some weakness in the evidence base, but we think the evidence base is strong enough to make the recommendations. And we’ve actually put into the report that where there isn’t enough evidence, we need to generate more evidence. And to be honest with you, we need a population study comparing people managed with routine care versus patients treated to target with rapid escalation. MSBase has kind of done that without the MRI monitoring, because they don’t have MRI data in their database. They’re just looking at the clinical, letting people break through with relapses versus relapse-free, in those that are rendered activity-free clinically, do much, much better. And I think that tells us that if we were using MRI, it will even be better. So at least we know that MRI activity is a surrogate for relapses. And there’s also scientific principle. We know, under the microscope, inflammatory lesions are not benign. They’re associated with transected axons, neuronal loss, etc. So it’s hard to deny the scientific principle of allowing lesions to continue to be active. To me it makes no biological sense. And this is not new. We’re just stealing the ideas from rheumatology and nephrology. They treat to target. They try and suppress inflammation as much as possible, and they’ve had incredible success. And they didn’t do it from an evidence base; they did it from a scientific principle. And, as they collected their data in registries, they confirmed what the science showed. Long-term follow-up with these patients has shown that if you treat to target in rheumatoid arthritis and with rapid escalation, you protect joints. And joint replacements now in rheumatoid patients has plummeted by more than 80 percent. I think our metric will have to be walking sticks and wheelchairs. We’ll see the use of walking sticks and wheelchairs plummet. Maybe employment – that’s the other thing we’re trying to highlight is most of the early disability in MS is not physical, it’s cognitive. And the early unemployment rates that occur before people become physically disabled are driven by cognitive problems which manifest as cognitive fatigue. So, you know, what we’re trying to do is also shift people’s attention away from just physical disability and think about cognition, which is an early disability. And hopefully, if we can treat people as early as possible, we’ll protect their cognition and allow them to continue working. So maybe the metric should be employment, as one of the metrics. MSDF So many reports in all areas come out and they’re sort of one-shot deals. Do you have a plan for giving this thing legs so that it’s not just buried once it came out? Dr. Giovannoni Yes, so we’ve got a whole lot of initiatives following on this. We’ve put together a grant application package. We’ve got a dissemination plan, both at a regional and international level. We’ll also want it connected to audit tools, so provide some audit tools where you can actually audit—measure—what we’re trying to achieve and, hopefully, use that as a quality metric. We think we if can start measuring, people will change their behavior. We also want to create an audit tool for people with MS to audit their own service. So in other words, they will go in and say, am I being monitored? How am I being monitored, just clinically or with MRI? And ask the right questions, and, hopefully, activating patients to ask their clinicians to be monitored may also change behavior. We don’t want it to be a name and shame type thing. We want it to be a positive thing, by measuring, we’ll change behavior, so that’s what we want to do. The only thing, though, it can’t be done quickly. We need to get buy in from the whole community, so we’ll have to have an engagement program to get there. Get a competition going, international competition where people can provide creative ideas to try and help with viral dissemination. So get an infographic or a movie or a play or a book or a poem, something that can go viral. And then we’re going to, hopefully, have funding to update the report. We are going to have a very active website where people can download the report. And we’re going to try and create content around Brain Health. Another thing we’re going to be doing is looking for funding to translate it into other languages. We’ve already had requests from several non-English speaking nations for translations. So the Dutch want it translated. South America wants it in Spanish. We’ve had a request from the Japanese, Russians. And so if we can get it translated, we’re probably not going to get the whole document translated. We’re going to make executive summaries, one for patient focused, one for clinicians, one for policy makers. And we’ll, hopefully, get those translated into multiple languages. MSDF MSDF will put the link on the site so that people can access it in English now. Is there anything to add or we’ve missed? Dr. Giovannoni I think we’ve got to start changing the behavior of neurologists in the sense that we need to make them think of their responsibility for looking after people with MS’s brains. We tend to focus on making them relapse free. If we actually shifted the target away from being relapse free but maintaining brain health, so these people can age as normally as possible – we’re not trying to say that people with MS will age normally, but we need our brains for when we get older. So if they start taking responsibility for the holistic management of MS, I think we’ll get the momentum going where people will be much more actively managing MS. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode 58 of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. MSdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller. [outro music]

[intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Fifty-Seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller. This week’s podcast comes to you from last week’s big MS meeting in Barcelona, Spain, with an interview with Dr. Timothy Vollmer, who gives his take on the early results of a large Phase 3 study of ocrelizumab for primary progressive MS. The experimental drug blocks circulating B cells. We will have several extra meeting-related podcasts for you in the next two weeks. In the next one, Dr. Gavin Giovannoni talks about a new push to use long term brain health as a goal in MS treatment. And Dr. Vollmer will return in the coming weeks to discuss the Denver treatment experience with another B cell blocking drug, rituximab. But first, here are some new items in the MS Discovery Forum. Every week MSDF lists the latest scientific papers related to MS with links to the abstracts on PubMed. Of nearly 100 new studies published last week, we selected three as editor’s picks. Two of our editor’s picks come from a larger collection on MS in JAMA Neurology. One study reports on an equivalence clinical trial comparing a generic glatiramer acetate, Synthon, with Copaxone, the branded glatiramer acetate, for relapsing remitting MS. A global team of investigators found equivalent efficacy, safety, and tolerability in the randomized, controlled trial. The findings provide reassurance about well-made generics for patients and neurologists, say other researchers in an editorial. But the whole idea of generics is to make a dent in the skyrocketing costs of MS drugs, and the generic is priced at $63,000 a year instead of $65,000 and $74,000 for the two versions of the branded drug. Another paper in the same JAMA Neurology checked to see what the vitamin D levels of nearly 1500 people treated with interferon beta-1B might say about the course of their disease. Higher vitamin D levels were associated with fewer new active lesions in the mostly white, mostly female patients with relapsing remitting MS, but there was no correlation with clinical disability or brain atrophy. Our third editor’s pick is a paper investigating the cancer risk from cladribine compared to other MS disease modifying treatments. A large Phase 3 study showed the experimental drug to be highly effective in relapsing remitting MS, with nearly half of patients showing no evidence of disease activity after two years and two courses of the treatment. But it was refused a license by the European Medicines Agency in 2013. Now, based on their new meta-analysis of eleven studies, the authors say they cannot confirm nor deny a cancer risk, and that cladribine should be investigated further as an MS therapy. Our drug development pipeline contains 44 investigational and approved agents for MS. Last week, we added results from two new trials, we updated information from 16 other trials, and we added 20 other pieces of information. Trial updates include findings about ocrelizumab’s ability to reduce relapses and minocycline’s capacity to reduce the risk of conversion to MS after an initial demyelinating event. [transition music] And now to our interview with Dr. Timothy Vollmer, Professor of Neurology and Medical Director of the Rocky Mountain MS Center at the University of Colorado in Denver. When we met at the European Committee for Treatment and Research in MS, or ECTRIMS, meeting in Barcelona, Dr. Vollmer laid out how results of the ORATORIO trial of ocrelizumab shed light on two hypotheses of what goes wrong in primary progressive MS, and which one is most likely. Interviewee – Timothy Vollmer There currently are two hypotheses for what drives primary progressive disease. One is that it’s like relapsing disease, and it’s driven by inflammation. And the other one is that it’s a noninflammatory disease that’s being driven by neurodegeneration and has a separate biology. Now that we have positive results from the ORATORIO study, which is a study of ocrelizumab which is an anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody that deletes B lymphocytes from circulation, given that this is the very first time we’ve ever succeeded, it’s telling us very important thing, and that is: inflammation does drive primary progressive MS. And the other important message from here is that this study studied a significantly younger patient population with primary progressive MS than all the other studies. The mean age was around 44. The reason that’s important is because, epidemiologically, we see a decrease in inflammatory activity as a function of age, and older patients often don’t express any evidence of that. And so far, in all the primary progressive studies, especially the OLYMPUS trial, those patient populations don’t respond to anything. So it’s telling us that we can treat primary progressive MS, but you’ve got to start early. Interviewer – Dan Keller That seems to be the message overall in MS, in general, though. Dr. Vollmer Yes it is. And the reason is, is because MS results in an accelerated brain volume loss, and brain volume loss is going to translate into disability, at some point, for almost everybody. Maintaining brain volume so that you can age normally late in life is a critical goal, not just in MS, but in other neurological diseases. MSDF Does that brain volume loss or other changes in the brain relate to really the onset of the progressive phase? Dr. Vollmer The answer is yes and no. From a statistical standpoint, it’s very hard to sort of identify a specific point in the process of brain volume loss that you can say, okay, they’re going to transition into progressive disease. That’s probably due to the fact that the mechanisms that underlie reserve capacity in brains may vary a little bit from patient to patient, and that they have different capacity to compensate for this injury. The other complication is that MS, as a multifocal disease, is not necessarily distributed evenly throughout the nervous system, though. In some patients, they have a relatively small amount of disease, but it’s in the neck, and they’re still highly disabled. And because of that very complicated pattern for it, it is hard just to use one global measure to predict how patients are going to be from a disability standpoint. MSDF Do the results of the ORATORIO study give us more confidence in pursuing the B cell as an important effector in MS? Dr. Vollmer Absolutely. The converging data, now, both in progressive forms and in relapsing forms, says the B cell is playing a critical role. There are CD20-positive T cells, and so there’s still some discussion whether the drug may be having an effect on those, but in the most recent reports, it does decrease those with first administration, but then they recover very quickly. And at subsequent administrations of the anti-CD20, they’re not deleted. So that pattern suggests to me it’s not an effect on T cells, it’s an effect on B cells which remain suppressed for months after a single injection. MSDF CD20 is on B cells but, as I understand, not on plasmablasts or plasma cells. So what is the relative contribution of B cell biology versus just antibody? Dr. Vollmer A major difference is that plasmablasts and plasma cells are not very good antigen presenting cells. Whereas, B cells, if they can engage the antigen that their B cell receptor is targeted for, become extremely effective antigen presenting cells: the most effective antigen presenting cells in the body. And they can be about ten thousand times more effective that dendritic cells or macrophages. So that’s why I think that, given the fact that the most effective therapies we’ve currently studied right now are all B cell based therapies, I think it’s telling us is that the B cell is playing that critical role, and most likely, that is in both cytokine release and in antigen presentation in the brain. MSDF From the ORATORIO study, what more do you want to see? The data is just coming out, and they’re going to do a bunch of analyses. What sort of things should they be looking at? Dr. Vollmer Well, they have a number of other clinical measures, and I believe they also have some patient reported outcomes, so I’d be very interested to see if the patients actually perceive a benefit as measured by those PROs. They have the timed twenty-five foot walk out, which they reached and was statistically significant. They had sustained disability progression at both three and six months which was statistically significant. And they reported brain volume loss was decreased in the ocrelizumab treated patients and was statistically significant. We would like to know more about the inflammatory markers in the patients and the correlation between having baseline evidence of disease activity, such as a gadolinium enhancing lesion, and the probability of response to therapy. MSDF What about the time course of response to the therapy? It seems like it’s more rapid than you would expect if an insult sometime in the past led to what you see today. But the ocrelizumab results seem to be on a faster track than that. Dr. Vollmer Well, the reason I believe that is, is because, as I said before, they really pushed down the median age in their population to much younger patients. And again, in long term studies that have looked at gadolinium enhancing disease activity, we do see it in primary progressive disease. So it’s not true, in my view, that primary progressive MS patients have a different MRI pattern. In studies that actually controlled for observer bias, where the neurologist didn’t have a chance to look with an MRI scan, but made the decision whether it was progressive or not progressive disease based on clinical history, which is the only way that we really can do it, then the previously reported biases of having nonspecific noninflammatory MRIs disappears. And that paper was published about six years ago. So, I think that we have a lot of built in biases, as a field, when you think about MS, and, unfortunately, those biases are often not supported by objective data. And yet, they do make their way into the literature, mainly because they don’t control for age. And when comparing progressive patients, relapsing patients, or primary progressive patients to relapsing patients the fundamental difference is progressive patients tend to be 10 to 15 years older on average than the relapsing patients they’re comparing them to. And it’s that age difference that explains most of the differences that people talk about. It’s not the fact they have a different form of the disease. MSDF Anything else to add on this that we’ve missed? Dr. Vollmer As I said, we need to get subset analysis out of the ORATORIO study to see just which age group and demographic the patients really got the most benefit. My suspicion is we’re going to again find it’s the younger patients that show the biggest effect, again emphasizing that starting early in the disease with therapy is a key issue. And, again, I think it’s going to argue that you need to use highly effective therapies as early as possible, in order to get the best effect. MSDF Very good, thank you. Dr. Vollmer Thank you. [transition music] MSDF Thank you for listening to Episode Fifty-Seven of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdicovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for multiple sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Holly Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send a comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I’m Dan Keller. [outro music]  

Transcript [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Fifty-Six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller. This week’s podcast features an interview with Dr. Gavin Giovannoni who discusses the first experimental drug to show some benefit in a progressive form of multiple sclerosis in a major trial. The drug is ocrelizumab, and the trial is called ORATORIO. But first, here are some new items in the MS Discovery Forum. The ocrelizumab findings were the big news at last week’s large international MS meeting in Barcelona, Spain. Our Research Roundup highlights other breaking stories from the meeting. Stay tuned for more in the days to come. We’ll be rolling out in-depth stories on some research themes we followed at the meeting. And we will have some extra meeting-related podcasts for you in the next two weeks. Every week, MSDF lists the latest scientific papers related to MS, with links to the abstracts on PubMed. Of 138 new studies published last week, we selected three as editor’s picks. In one study, a British team found a new reason why remyelination fails in disease. When damaged axons lose their myelin sheath, as in multiple sclerosis, they strike up a conversation with immature myelin-making cells. The axons reach out with new synapses to order the cells to grow up and make new myelin. If axons can’t call for help, as also may happen in MS, the myelin-making cells cannot respond. The team made their discovery in rat brains. They also found new synapses and telltale signaling molecules in postmortem brain lesion samples from people with MS. In another paper, a Spanish group looked at other factors that may block the brain’s ability to repair itself after inflammatory damage. A pair of molecules, known as semaphorins, may block myelin-making cells from coming to the rescue of damaged axons. The findings come from human tissue samples and may hold promise as targets for future treatment. Our third editor’s pick paper looks at factors influencing the intention to exercise and the execution of exercise among people with multiple sclerosis. A Danish team did an extensive review of rehabilitation and sports medicine literature. They found that health professionals can help on both fronts. Our Drug-Development Pipeline contains 44 investigational and approved agents for MS. Last week, we added two new findings from clinical trials, we updated information from another trial, and we added 10 other pieces of information to the database. The drugs with important additions are alemtuzumab, dalfampridine, fingolimod, glatiramer acetate, idebenone, natalizumab, and teriflunomide. One update summarizes the finding that fingolimod induces the expression of neuroprotective factors by human astrocytes. [transition music] And now to our interview with Dr. Gavin Giovannoni, head of neurology at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry in the U.K. We spoke with him at the recent European Committee for Treatment and Research in MS, or ECTRIMS, meeting in Barcelona about the Brain Health report that was launched at the meeting and about the ORATORIO trial of ocrelizumab in primary progressive MS. We'll cover the Brain Health report in future podcasts with him and other authors of the report. But today, Dr. Giovannoni lays out the methodology of ORATORIO, which may explain some of the very good reduction in disease progression, observed in this trial for the first time in primary progressive MS. Interviewer – Dan Keller In the ORATORIO trial, what was the aim, and I guess what's the big outcome? Interviewee – Gavin Giovannoni Well, the ORATORIO trial is essentially a phase III trial of depleting anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody called ocrelizumab in primary-progressive MS. As you're aware, almost every trial done in primary-progressive MS has been negative. And then the motivation behind the ocrelizumab trial was based on the rituximab trial; ocrelizumab is a follow-on and rituximab is more humanized, so that should come with fewer side effects like infusion reactions and anti-drug antibodies. In that rituximab trial, there was a subgroup of the population that responded. These were people that are younger and had MRI activity. So when we designed the ocrelizumab ORATORIO trial, we tried to enrich the study for young people and people that were more active, more enhancing lesions, and we did that. So the population is younger, and the proportion of patients with gadolinium-enhancing lesions at baseline was about a quarter of them. And we also made sure that all the patients had an abnormal CSF spinal fluid. The reason for that is in the Copaxone glatiramer acetate trial, patients who didn't have an abnormal CSF behaved very differently to those with an abnormal CSF, so we wanted to make sure that we had a homogeneous population. And we made sure they had oligoclonal bands or raised IgG in the spinal fluid simply because we we're trying to target a B cell response; so those that are CSF-negative may not be responsive to a B cell therapy. Lots of features of this trial that we try to wait to make it positive, so we're really, really excited about the results, that people on ocrelizumab had an approximately 25% reduction in confirmed disease progression on EDSS compared to patients on placebo. And it was an event-driven, so the trial wasn't designed to be a fixed time point, it was designed as soon as you got enough events; it was like an adaptive trial, so it was quite cleverly designed in that regard. So it's great news. Now whether the trial was positive because ocrelizumab is a more effective therapy than the others, or because it's targeting something special like the B cell, at the moment is not known. The only way we're going to find that out is if we do another primary-progressive trial with another highly effective therapy and see what happens there. But this is fantastic news for people with progressive MS. If you follow any patient forums or blogs or whatever, the most frustrated, depressed group is the primary-progressive patients; they've been neglected for years, decades. I think that's the big news, we now will have a therapy which we can offer them. The one unknown, though, is maybe this result has been driven by a particular subgroup, and I think the regulators and the payers will want to get that data from us. Because if it is driven by a particular subgroup, they may limit the license and the payment for that particular subgroup, the responder group. And so I can't talk to that yet, because most of the subgroup and post-hoc analyses haven't been done. But potentially maybe like the rituximab trial, there will be a proportion of the patients that have characteristic features that are more responsive to the drug, and drive the trial results compared to the other group. And if that is the case, then it's still good news regardless. MSDF As it stands now, it seems like the indication would be for people with abnormal CSF, oligoclonal bands, or elevated IgG. Is there any thought that this drug may work possibly by the same mechanism even if you're not seeing abnormal CSF? Dr. Giovannoni The spinal fluid tests aren't 100% perfect, so there are people who will have false-negative results. But I've always been a big proponent of the hypothesis that the oligoclonal response in the spinal fluid is something key to this disease. We see that response in infectious diseases like neurosyphilis, measles, rubella panencephalitis, herpes; it's really a signature of its common to infectious diseases, which is why I'm still a supporter of the hypothesis that MS may be an infectious disease. You do find that in a few other autoimmune diseases, particularly the paraneoplastic plastic syndromes, that it's a signature of an intrathecal B cell response. And this drug targets B cells. One thing it doesn't target, though, it's the long-lived plasma cell, and so CD20 actually stops being expressed, even on plasmablasts, so as soon as you go from the mature B cell to plasmablast to plasma cells, you don't deplete those with anti-CD20. So we know from rituximab data that the oligoclonal bands persist, so we need longer punctures, you don't get rid of those. But until we have long-term followup, we don't know. Maybe drugs that target the plasmablast and the plasma cell will be more effective than rituximab. We don't have any of those drugs available in MS yet. There's one that's being developed, it's anti-CD19; CD19 gets expressed onto the plasmablast and some plasma cells, and there are some specific markers for plasma cells. But if you gave those to people with MS, you'd probably deplete them of their antibody-producing cells and make them a gamma globulin anemic. Then you'd have to probably then start supplementing with gamma globulin, so it gets quite complicated. But at the moment, the drug will be licensed, I think, for continuous use every 6 months; it won't be induction therapy. Some of the data would suggest you could potentially use it as induction therapy, so, you know, do 2 years and then wait and see if the disease comes back. But the way the drug's been developed at the moment is for continuous maintenance use. There are some concerns; can you continue to use it in the B cell depletion forever? And that's going to have to be answered with the open-label extension studies. MSDF Since plasma cells persist and oligoclonal bands persist, if I understood you correctly, do you think that the pathology is mediated through antibody, or this depletion of B cells is acting in a different way, that the B cells are interacting either with T cells or on their own doing something? Dr. Giovannoni I mean, there is pretty good evidence from the pathology literature that antibodies are very important in MS. So whether or not you accept it, there is pathological classifications of the top 1 to 4. And there is antibody and complement activation in MS lesions, and there is emerging evidence that so-called grey matter lesions and subpial lesions on the surface are particularly driven by antibody and complement. So I do think they are pathogenic. And so you may get rid of the focal inflammatory lesions that appear to be T cell-driven, whereas the cortical subpial lesions may be antibody-driven. So you may be getting rid of one pathology and not all the pathologies, which is why I remain a little bit skeptical still about whether or not this anti-CD20-depleting antibody will be effective in the long-term. So we may need additional treatment to target plasma cells. And what you've got to ask yourself really is what's driving those oligoclonal bands. We know they are highly selected, so they're not just there. They're oligoclonal, they've undergone selection by hypermutation, so there's some antigen driving them. They respond to something, and we just haven't been able to find out what they respond to. They are pathogenic, and if we do find the cause of MS, that will almost certainly begins to cause the disease. An analogy would be herpes encephalitis; if somebody's had a herpes infection, then you take those oligoclonal bands out and you absorb them against the antigen from herpes, you remove almost all the antibodies. So they are antigen-specific in the infectious space. We've tried for years to find out what those bands react against in MS, and we haven't found it. There's several groups still working on it, and I would encourage them to continue working it, because that may be where the action is. MSDF The ORATORIO data was only begun to be analyzed very recently. You had mentioned that you were going to be doing subgroup analyses. Are there other analyses yet to come? Dr. Giovannoni I mean, the headline results are probably in main secondary outcomes, and there's less of tertiary outcomes. We need to do subgroup analyses trying to look at brain atrophy, the time course of the progressions. I'm very interested in second progressions, because I have this theory that early progressions in progressive disease is not driven by inflammation that occurs in this epoch, it's in the past; so inflammation a year or two ago is driving progression now. And so when you design these progressive trials, a large number of people progress early. And I think it's nothing to do with the trials because it's happened before the trial. So what you then need to do is look at progressions in the future to see if they flatline or stabilize. So there's lots of luck. I think we need to play around with the data, look at the first and second confirmed progressions, incorporate the brain MRI activity as the confounder. There's lots to do, tons to do. But it's good news. The excitement about those analyses are generated because you've got a positive result. MSDF Picking up on this idea that what you see today is the result of an insult that happened sometime before, what is the time course that you see using ocrelizumab in terms of benefit; is it so rapid that it questions whether what you said is what's operating? Dr. Giovannoni Yes, it's too rapid. When you see the survival curves, they go flat very early, so this is actually saying something else which is really surprising me, which is why I think some of the activity may be driven by an anti-inflammatory, because we know that anti-inflammatory drugs have an effect quite quickly. So that's why I'm suspicious that the positive result is driven by an inflammatory core of patients, and those with the more neurodegenerative or previous inflammation are unlikely to respond. That's my worry with the drug. But let's see what their subgroup analyses show. MSDF Anything we've missed or important to add on that? Dr. Giovannoni What I want to mention to people with the disease is they shouldn't overhype expectations. The simple reason is when you've got progressive disease you've already lost reserve, so that's why you're progressing. So in early relapsing disease, you make recovery from attacks because you've got ability to recover, a reserve. And so early on you stabilize or improve, and later on you slow down progression. So I'm trying to tell people with the disease if you do go into this therapy, don't expect to improve or get better. You're much more likely to progress more slowly, which you won't notice. It's hard in an individual to say they're progressing more slowly, or you'll plateau out and stabilize. I think that must be the expectation, rather than improvement. And I think we need to manage those expectations, that people may not at a personal level find a big dramatic response in terms of their disability on the drug. MSDF But this sounds like – getting back to the discussion of the Brain Health report – where you should diagnosis and treat rather quickly. At least now if someone comes in with primary-progressive, there may be at some point something to do from the start. Dr. Giovannoni Yeah. Well, it's like with any neurodegenerative disease, the sooner you treat the more you've got to protect, and the later you treat the less you've got to protect. So this would be a call to get primary-progressive disease diagnosed as soon as possible and treat as soon as possible. And if you look at the diagnostic delay in primary-progressive disease, it's probably worse than relapsing disease. People often go years before being diagnosed. So we're going to have to sharpen up the referral pathways and the diagnostic pathways in primary-progressive disease to get that timeless brain concept across there, too. [transition music] Thank you for listening to Episode Fifty-Six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Carol Cruzan Morton. Heather McDonald curated the MSDF drug database updates. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations. MSDiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org. For Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, I'm Dan Keller. [outro music]

*Did you know that the back is the most common location for the deadliest form of skin cancer? Board-certified dermatologist Dr. Lauren Ploch joins your national award-winning family radio talk show Let's Talk America with Host Shana Thornton to discuss melanoma and more. The Alzheimer’s Association International Conference recently wrapped up in Washington, DC. Dr. Heather Snyder, Director of Medical and Scientific Operations at the Alzheimer’s Association, joins the show to reveal the latest research developments. Dr. Juan Ochoa and dietitian Samantha Lynch join the show to spotlight baby boomer nutrition. Lastly, Dr. Jen Arnold will talk to Shana about childhood vaccinations. You will want to hear the latest in medical news. Join us and tell a friend.     *Please visit www.letstalkamericawithshanathornton.com. Thank you. 

More than 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease, every 67 seconds someone in the U.S. develops the disease and it's the 6th leading cause of death in our country. The Alzheimer's Association is the world's leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer's care, support and research. We spoke with Dr. Heather Snyder, Director of Medical & Scientific Operations for alz.org.

[intro music]   Hello, and welcome to Episode Twenty-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.   This week’s podcast features an interview with Professor Aksel Siva about radiologically isolated syndrome. But to begin, here is a brief summary of some of the latest developments on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.   The role of diet in MS is a longstanding question, for which there many opinions, but few definitive answers. Researchers and clinicians know little about how diet may contribute to the risk of developing MS, and how it may help or hurt the progress of the disease once it starts. Nevertheless, patients are pushing for answers, hoping that there is more they can do to help slow their disease. We recently published a story looking into all the facts and myths of diet. We also covered what makes diet so difficult to study in a clinical setting, and where the field is going from here.   2015 is just around the corner, and deadlines are looming for submitting meeting abstracts and funding applications. Abstract submission deadlines for the Keystone Symposia are coming up in December, and ECTRIMS and the National MS Society have deadlines for funding opportunities early in January. For more details on the deadlines and how to submit your materials, go to the professional resources tab on our website and click on either “meetings and events” or “funding opportunities.”   We have also posted several exciting new job opportunities on our website. Go to the “jobs” section under professional resources to view them. And, if you’re looking for a neurologist, a laboratory technician, a post-doc, or any other position—let us know. We’ll help spread the word on our jobs section and in our weekly newsletter, and it won’t cost you a dime to reach a very choice group of MS professionals. Simply go to the “jobs” section and click on the “submit new item” button under the “Job Listings” header.   [transition music]   Now to the interview. Professor Aksel Siva is a professor of neurology at Istanbul University in Turkey. His work spans areas from clinical neuroimmunology to neuro-epidemiology to research in headaches.    Interviewer – Dan Keller When we met he discussed radiologically isolated syndrome or RIS and he starts by describing what it is.   Interviewee – Aksel Siva It is by definition an individual who gets an MRI for another reason such as migraine headache or whatever. Then, it turns out that they have MS looking like lesions in their brains. You cannot explain those lesions with any other pathology. They are not related to the patient's cause of referral for an MRI. Their neurological examination is normal, and these people never have experienced any neurological symptom, which might be consistent with past history of MS whatsoever.   It is an MRI diagnosis actually. It is not a clinical diagnosis. The question is whether these people do really have subclinical MS or asymptomatic MS and are they going to develop the disease. So the question is what to do when you see these patients. And this has been recently described as radiologically isolated syndrome by Okuda et al. At that time, there were acute CSF and now Darin is in Texas and at that time his mentor Daniel Pelletier is at Yale. So they have introduced this term. There have been, I would say, three pivotal papers by the French group, Christine Lebrun and her colleagues, and from our center together with Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Then this group came together and we have formed the Radiologically Isolated Syndrome Consortium, which has been later on joined by some other centers from Europe and the U.S.    MDSF So if you don’t know whether these people will go on to MS or where they stand, what do you do about it? How do you follow them and how many of these people do go on to MS?   Professor Siva The Radiologically Isolated Syndrome Consortium, we have conducted a study, which was published earlier this year in PLoS ONE and we have collected 451 cases with this syndrome. When they were followed, about 34% developed a neurological event consistent with either CIS or primary progressive MS. This means that about one-third of these people, who receive a diagnosis of radiologically isolated syndrome, in five years’ time, will develop clinical MS. And 10% of this group will develop primary progressive MS, which is very similar to what we see in two clinical cohorts. When statistically you follow these up to ten years and this is statistical, it turns out that around 55% will develop the disease. So at ten years’ time, still half of these people will not develop clinical MS. What does this mean? It is not clear, but on the other side, it seems that some people, who do have radiologically lesions consistent with multiple sclerosis and may continue to get new ones, still will not the clinical disease. We have known this from some autopsy studies started to be published in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, that there were cases, autopsy cases, where people turned out to have changes in their brains consistent with multiple sclerosis, but they never had the disease in their lifetime. We have to consider this subpopulation in both understanding the disease and when we should consider to start treatment, or whether we should really treat all people with MS or not.   MDSF There has been a feeling that you don't treat the image, but you treat the disease, but a lot of these people do go on to get the disease. Is it time for a randomized trial to see if you treat these people, some of them who would statistically go on, will not go on to get the disease?   Professor Siva It is time to start a treatment trial in RIS and our EOS colleagues, mainly Darin Okuda and Daniel Pelletier and Orhun Kantarci will be starting such a study in the U.S. later this year. There is also another probable trial that might start in Europe by Christine Lebrun. Yes we have come to this era, and probably within let's say a few years, we will have more evidence regarding who should be treated or who should not be when they present with RIS.   MDSF In the study that you looked at people for five years, what did you see were some of the risk factors for going on to MS?   Professor Siva There were some clear-cut risk factors and this was, as already shown by Darin and their group in EOS [?] a couple of years ago, having a spinal cord lesion at the time of the RIS diagnosis is a predictive factor to develop MS. Other factors are male gender and younger age; because when we have looked in this RIS cohort of the 450 or so cases, the mean age of diagnosis was 37, which is older than the general mean age that we diagnose MS. So this should be also taught whether this is because we have just by coincidence we get these incidental lesions in some people who will never develop the disease.    MDSF Now this study started a while ago to be able to be published recently. In that amount of time people have been looking at a lot of biomarkers. Did you consider biomarkers at that time? Can you find something that is predictive of going on to MS?   Professor Siva Not yet. Actually this study was a retrospective study, but in part it was prospective because in our center we have been interested in this for more than ten years now, almost 15 years. I should say that in Turkey we have a lot of MRIs and the cost is very low. It is very practical for, let's say general neurologists to refer patients for headaches, for not otherwise you would refer for a MRI, to refer them to MRIs, and then suddenly you started to see this MS looking-like lesions. As we have in MS center, we had a lot of referrals and then we started to follow these people. It’s been more or less the same in the other centers. It is yes, a retrospective data collection, but most of this cohort has been prospectively followed in those centers from the time of their admittance. And your question was whether there was a biomarker other than imaging, not really. Not yet, let's put it that way.   MDSF So is it advisable to follow them with imaging and if so, how often?   Professor Siva It is what we are doing now. There have been some suggested algorithms, but what we do in our center, we ask those patients to have a followup MRI in six months. Then within another six months, unless they develop something clinical, and then if they continue to have changes or not in their MRIs, that depends on how frequently we start to follow them up by MRI. Our tendency is twice for the first six months and then yearly for the next two years and then three years or two years later, unless they develop a clinical event consistent with MS or whatever.   MDSF Necessarily these interval MRIs are really snapshots, even in MS lesions come and go. I suppose it would be possible to miss a lesion that was there and that isn't there at the time of the MRI.   Professor Siva Definitely. But it has been shown, again in our study, that about two-thirds of these people continue to have new MRI lesions, but only one-third of the whole population develop a CIS or other event consistent with MS. Having new lesions doesn't really mean that the risk is much higher. Developing new MRI lesions is not always equal to develop the disease or having a much higher risk. It has been shown by the Queen Square Group many years ago when they have followed people who were admitted with CIS for up to 20 years. Ten to 15 % of these populations who presented with CIS, mostly optic neuritis continued to have new lesions, but they never developed a second clinical attack. It is more or less, I believe, for RIS some of those people will continue to have maybe one or two lesions when you do a followup MRI, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily will develop the disease. Even having positive oligoclonal bands is not a much higher risk by itself.   MDSF It would be quite a burden to treat 100% of the RIS population to be able to avert a progression to MS in about a third or over ten years about 55%. I guess, what you really need to do is be able to figure out who will progress. I guess a subpart of that question is, how do you know, or do you know, who will go on to primary progressive MS?   Professor Siva Well we cannot say this when they don't have any clinical symptoms and signs, because in our center we had three such patients who developed primary progressive MS after a period of four to eight years, when we have followed them radiologically. Probably another question is, whether all primary progressive MSs are really primary progressive, or are let's say secondary progressive MS, the diagnosis was done when they have gone through all of the let's say CIS, relapsing-remitting MS subclinically, and when they have entered in the secondary progressive phase, then, the disease became clinically surfaced and because of this we thought that this was people who were primary progressive. Because when you look at these people and we had those…well the whole group, the RIS we have more such cases, which is now prepared for publication. These people continue to have new lesions and they are not really any different than the relapsing-remitting cases. This is another issue that we should consider.   MDSF So in essence asymptomatic MS might really be MS and what looks like primary progressive is really secondary progressive.   Professor Silva Could be. That is a possibility. If I am not wrong, it was the late Charles Poser who had suggested that a number of MS patients the disease goes subclinically for a certain period of time, but they continue to have axonal degeneration and after a certain threshold they become only clinically symptomatic. It might be an analogy between this view and what we have observed.   MDSF Is there anything important to add on the subject of RIS?   Professor Silva Our approach is on an individual basis. Yes, we do have some evidence, we do have some findings, but that doesn't mean that when you see an individual with RIS they will do how it is expected according to the present evidence. When I am with my patients, or I shouldn't call them patients, but the individuals with RIS, my approach is on an individual basis. If they continue to have new MRI lesions and it is really high T2 load on the MRI, we ask for a CNS study, if they have positive oligoclonal bands, they have but normal visual evoked potentials; they have family members and so on. The way I approach those individuals is a little bit different than someone who has a few lesions, just enough to make a diagnosis of RIS, but don't have really other risk factors, no spinal cord and so on. When it comes to the patients we should make our decisions on an individual basis. I do not treat people RIS, but there might be some exceptions.   MDSF Very good, I appreciate it.   [transition music]   Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Robert Finn. Msdiscovery.org is part of the non-profit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.    Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.    [outro music]  

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Twenty-one of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.   This week’s podcast features an interview with Dr. Paul Matthews about imaging in multiple sclerosis. But to begin, here’s a brief summary of some of the latest developments on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.   We recently reported on a draft of a review released by the Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality about discontinuing disease-modifying therapies in patients with MS. Though the report’s main conclusion was that little evidence is available to assess the risks and benefits of discontinuing therapies, several MS groups came together to criticize the report during the open comment period. Groups like the National MS Society and Medical Partners 4 MS raised concerns that the review was not conducted properly and that insurance providers may use it as justification to reduce coverage of DMTs for MS. The AHRQ told Multiple Sclerosis Discovery Forum that they would consider the comments carefully and make any necessary revisions.   MSDF’s parent organization, the Accelerated Cure Project, is launching a new research resource called iConquer MS. Hollie Schmidt, Vice President of Scientific Operations at the Accelerated Cure Project, recently wrote a blog post explaining that the new initiative aims to take data and biosamples from 20,000 people with MS and make them open-access to researchers. We want your input about what you may want to do with such a resource. If you’re interested, go to the blogs section of MS Discovery Forum under the “News and Future Directions” tab and click on the blog post titled, “Invitation to Share Your Thoughts on a New MS Research Resource.”   Our list of meetings and events is ever-growing. We’ve posted multiple meetings of all shapes and sizes sprinkled throughout 2015 and even into 2016. And if you know of a meeting that’s not yet listed, please do submit what information you have. We’ll take care of the rest. Just go to “Meetings and Events” under the “Professional Resources” tab on our website and click on the “submit new item” button to tell us about your event. We’re even willing to list local departmental seminars and journal clubs.   [transition music]   Now to the interview. Professor Paul Matthews is at Imperial College London in brain sciences. He met with MSDF to talk shop about imaging in MS.   Interviewer – Dan Keller Welcome, Professor Matthews. What do you see now as new modalities or new ways of doing imaging, and what’s coming along?   Interviewee - Paul Matthews Thanks, Dan. Imaging continues to reinvent itself in areas particularly like MS. Magnetic resonance is becoming more and more powerful with use of particularly multiband techniques, allowing multiple coils to be used to accelerate the imaging process, and because of that being able to collect much more data to enhance particularly diffusion images. So, for example, within the Human Connectome Project, development of new multiband techniques has accelerated imaging to the point where very high resolution diffusion tensor images can be acquired in spaces of 15-20 minutes. The implications of this for MS are that we can begin to develop powerful approaches to expression of the diffusion tensor information in terms of diffusion parallel to the fibers, perpendicular to the fibers, and free diffusion that is anisotropic. This means that potentially we’re going to be able to separate out free-water contributions from those contributions arising from myelin and axonal loss, providing a very powerful complement to magnetization transfer images.   A second area of major development in magnetic resonance is the increased use of ultra-high field systems at 7T, and potentially higher, for applications in MS. The first advantage this has brought is for increased spatial resolution that can be used to begin to image cortical lesions with a really impressively enhanced sensitivity. The second area has been new kinds of contrast. The high magnetic fields allow new susceptibility-weighted contrast to be generated which provides a powerful way of visualizing vessels. It’s very clearly defining the vessels at the center of most of the inflammatory lesions, helping a little bit with differential diagnosis, but even more importantly helping us understand what the microvascular architecture is in and around lesions.   A second potential advantage of the ultra-high field is simply increasing the sensitivity of MR for applications in magnetic resonance spectroscopy. We’ve known for a long time that signals from myo-inositol can help us understand glial components of inflammatory lesions, but there’s increasing interest in applying this kind of tool to measurements of glutathione, to provide indices related to reactive oxygen species generation, and potentially also to measuring excitotoxic neurotransmitters such as glutamate.   In a completely different space, positron emission tomography (PET) has begun to play a renewed kind of role in MS. I’ve always been a little bit disappointed that more wasn’t done with it over the last decade or so since pioneering studies that demonstrated that assessments of energy metabolism based on simply the fluorodeoxyglucose signal not only discriminated people with MS from healthy volunteers, but, more importantly, began to show discrimination between different stages of the disease and a relationship to cognitive impairment, with potentially reversible components with treatment. Now, that still is an area of potential work.   But more recently focus has shifted particularly to use of ligands that bind to the 18 kilodalton translocator protein which provides a marker of microglial inflammation in the brain. While it’s not entirely specific and with the caveat that we have little understanding of the relationship between the TSPO expression and the microglial phenotype, it clearly is highlighting some very interesting things. First, we found that the TSPO binding by ligands is increased multifocally in brains of people with MS; it’s increased multifocally in the white matter and in the grey matter. Moreover, increases in binding in both regions are related to degrees of disability; patients with higher disability show increased binding particularly in the cortex.   There’s emerging evidence, driven first by elegant preclinical studies done by the Finnish group and some human studies yet to be fully reported, that there are also strong treatment effects with powerful amino modulators. So because this provided us a window that is clearly giving us information distinct from that provided by T2 hyperintense lesions on MRI or by gadolinium enhancement on MRI, it promises a powerful adjunct.   And, finally, just to kind of round that idea out, it’s clear that it will be the combination of MR and PET that’s powerful rather than PET replacing MR in some way in our diagnostic or monitoring armamentarium for treatment. One manufacturer has already started supplying commercially integrated MRI-PET systems. Another manufacturer is expected to do so very soon, and potentially a third. This may become a platform for brain imaging that is very powerful for disorders like MS that have multifocal manifestations where the registration – the precise registration – between the MRI and the PET becomes important. Moreover, the potential to use dynamic MRI acquisitions where we’re just imaging very, very rapidly throughout the entire PET scanning period to follow the position of the head within the PET scanner may allow a new kind of precision of special resolution in the PET scan that allows MS studies where we rely on this very much to be done with far greater precision than it’s been possible in the past. So with these developments in MR, with the new radioligands in PET, and with this new technology for integrated MRI-PET, I think the brain imaging is off in incredibly new spaces.   Now I can’t close the discussion of imaging without at least making a mention of the revolution in applications of optical coherence tomography that have been conducted over the last five years in particular for MS. This is really exciting, too. It’s an inexpensive examination that can be performed very rapidly in any clinic that provides very high-resolution measures of optic nerve fiber layers, of multifocal edematous regions within the nerve fiber layer, all of which can provide measures to stage MS and its associated neurodegeneration, and potentially to usefully monitor it in assessing the progress of patients on treatments. It’s an exciting time for imaging.   Interviewer - MSDF Now just to clarify, this is optical coherence tomography of the retina and its surrounding structures.   Interviewee - Dr. Matthews Yeah, Dan, thanks for clarifying that. Absolutely. So it’s an eye examination, but it’s an adjunct because the retina is just an extension of what we study in the brain.   Interviewer - MSDF Either using metabolic markers or following metabolism with PET or something else, or using other ligands and markers, can you discern or image where remyelination is occurring?   Interviewee - Dr. Matthews So, of course, the world of PET is a big one because what we can observe changes with the type of radiotracer that we use. Recently, Yanming Wang, who I had the privilege of collaborating with at Case Western, published, I think, a really groundbreaking paper. Although it was a preclinical study, I think it shows the way we could be moving in this space. Using a novel radiotracer that he developed called MeDAS – MeDAS for short – this carbon positron-emitting isotope-incorporated tracer allows specific myelin proteins to be imaged, and thus provides a marker of myelin integrity in life. Yanming has shown how it can selectively image myelin, it can image both established myelin and new myelin being formed, and he demonstrated in a proof of concept study in rodents that the dynamics of demyelination and remyelination following therapeutic intervention can be followed, and moreover, that the therapeutic effect can be quantified relative to an untreated control group.   Really exciting and a potentially important adjunct to MTR or diffusion measurements in human studies. The trick of moving a tracer from preclinical studies into humans is not without some need for care, but because only microdoses of these tracers are used for the human imaging experiment, Yanming, myself, and colleagues believe we can make this transition rapidly. We’re watching closely to see what happens next.   Interviewer - MSDF Pretty good. I appreciate it.   Interviewee - Dr. Matthews Thanks, Dan.   [transition music]   Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-one of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Robert Finn. Msdiscovery.org is part of the non-profit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is vice president of scientific operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.    [outro music]

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.   This week’s Podcast features an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Dunn, who explores the prospect of personalized medicine in MS. But to begin, here’s a brief summary of some of the topics we’ve been covering on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.   Recently, blogger Emily Willingham shared a person experience with MRI interpretation in our blog, MS Patient, Ph.D. She wrote, “I’ve come to realize in my various dealings with MRI reports that neuroradiologists are like economists; everyone has an opinion and no two readers will agree on what they see in exactly the same data.” Willingham, a developmental biologist, provides a unique view into the life of an MS patient. Her experiences bring a first-person perspective of MS, while her scientific background informs her insights in a way that many researchers and clinicians may find valuable.   We’d also like to bring your attention to the data visualization section of the MSDF website. Under the research resources tab, you can find a series of interactive data visualizations useful for MS researchers. One visualization aggregates 106 clinical trials. You can organize the data by the compound, phase, population, or even the funding. Our latest visualization is of the natural history of MS symptoms. The interactive bar chart allows you to see the change of various symptom severity in MS over a 30-year period.   Also in research resources, check out the drug development pipeline. This is where we keep detailed information on, at last count, 40 drugs currently in development or on the market for MS. This database, which is updated daily as new information becomes available, contains a wealth of data on each agent. This includes the agent’s class, its intended target and routes of administration, its regulatory status and commercial history, its chemical properties, mechanism of action and adverse effects, and all its clinical trials.   Now for the interview. Dr. Jeffrey Dunn is a Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. He met with MSDF editor Bob Finn to discuss the use of biomarkers and personalized medicine. But first he shared a little history.   Interviewee – Jeffrey Dunn So, in the history of multiple sclerosis, when cases of CNS demyelinating disease were first discovered, they were discovered as isolated case instances at a number of different and variable institutions throughout Europe and in the United States. The doctors knew of the patients’ symptoms, of course, because they had cared for them. Many of these patients went on to pathology examination, and multiple cases of areas of inflammation or even scar formation were seen within the central nervous system. These cases from the mid-1800s and into the late-1800s were described as isolated instances. And the physician who is given credit for the discovery of what we now know to be multiple sclerosis was Dr. John-Martin Charcot in Paris, because he had had the experience of a very close relationship with a patient he named Mademoiselle V. He had known that she had had a tremor and ataxia and eye movement abnormalities, so Charcot knew his patient’s phenotype, her clinical manifestations, very well, and specifically had seen evidence of eye movement abnormalities, tremor, and ataxia. She had consented to have her nervous system evaluated pathologically, and so Charcot was able to make a connection between what she had looked like in life, and then what her brain and spinal cord had looked like after she had passed away.   It’s that clinicopathologic correlation that really was a paradigm-buster at the time. And Charcot found palpably hard spots – areas of gliosis or scar formation – that occurred in plaques and patches throughout the spinal cord and brain (and cerebellum in this case). He called the disease almost an adjective really; he called it “la sclérose en plaques”, which is French for sclerosis – meaning hard spots essentially – in plaques. So hard spots was the disease. Multiple sclerosis is really an adjective more than a diagnosis. But in the early 20th Century leading up to the mid-20th century, there was increasing recognition on the basis of these isolated case reports that this disease that was now increasingly being called multiple sclerosis might be far more common than people had realized, and great credit needs to be given to Sylvia Lawry, who as you know was the founder of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. The National MS Society was put together to try to bring physicians together to create a forum by which they could crosstalk, share the anecdotal information each of them had compiled, and come up with a more systematic review so that the disease could be better described and so that treatments could be more likely discovered. This was a huge step forward in terms of our discovery and ability to diagnosis and ultimately later to treat MS, but it created a framework that said that MS was, in some respects, one disease.   Now all of us even today, I would say, as physicians are trained that MS is a distinct disease; that it’s one type of disease with many variations according to individuals, but I think we’re actually at the very beginning of a very important paradigm shift in this consideration. There’s a difference, of course, between a disease and a syndrome. A disease is a quantifiable isolated entity – a classic example might be a genetic disorder caused by a single mutation in a coding sequence of DNA – whereas a syndrome is probably a collection of different but closely related diseases. I think there’s increasing evidence now, an increasing recognition that MS may be very heterogeneous and variable across individuals; I don’t think there would be any argument among my colleagues that MS is a heterogeneous process. My suggestion to you is that now, I think, we’re at the threshold of a paradigm that says that MS should not be regarded as a monolith or a single pathologic entity, but maybe more as a Stonehenge; a collection of closely related conditions that share some common pathology, but that need to be considered on an individual basis.   At the clinical, radiologic, immunologic, and pathologic levels we have evidence that MS is very heterogeneous among individuals. I think the theory that we now need to proceed according to is that multiple sclerosis is not one disease entity, but a number of different conditions. This idea and paradigm of personalized medicine is gaining traction. Our oncology colleagues who treat cancer have used this with some great and promising success in terms of applying optimum regimens and chemotherapeutic protocols to their patients, but I think there’s tremendous opportunity in multiple sclerosis to practice personalized medicine, because I think that the process of MS is a personalized one in which there are unique and eminently measurable proteins or protein profiles one day we’ll be able to identify, and hopefully that day is soon, and we can use that as the rationale for our prescription for the patients.   Interviewer – Bob Finn So when some people think about biomarkers, they think about an individual protein or some other biological signal that will be prognostic or in some other way tell you about what the patient is experiencing or might experience. It sounds to me like you’re talking about not an individual biomarker, but a constellation of biomarkers that would provide a fingerprint. Am I right about that?   Dr. Dunn I think so. Just as the disease pathogenesis itself is heterogeneous, I don’t think that one single protein would be able to help us. What I would foresee as an individual approaches us, that we might do a panel. There’s a series of questions that has to be asked. The immune process itself is sequential and acts, I think, as a cascade, and we have some biomarkers today that are available. I think you could argue them as biomarkers that help us in decision-making, that help the clinician decide what might be the best therapy, at least in terms of risk-benefit balance, but we just don’t have enough of them to be able to make the kinds of personalized decisions that I think we all hope we’ll be able to make one day.   MSDF Would you mention a couple of the ones that are – or some of the ones – that are available now?   Dr. Dunn So one example that I think would be well agreed on is the presence or absence of JC virus infection that can now be measured by a two-step ELISA assay, with a false-positive rate of an estimated 2.5%. One of the great challenges we face in treating MS is that we have to, in some respects, down-regulate the immune system to protect the brain and central nervous system, but we can’t overshoot the mark to cause a systemic immunosuppression. Immunosuppression can manifest in a number of different ways, including opportunistic infections and even malignancy. One of the most lethal and daunting of the opportunistic infections is a condition called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy – that’s precisely why we tend to call that PML instead, three syllables is far preferable – and that condition is caused by an infection of an otherwise relatively benign virus called JC virus, that if it gets into the central nervous system and begins to affect oligodendrocytes and cells of the central nervous system, can cause rapid intracellular proliferation and damage to the brain; that can spread geometrically throughout the brain and can cause very profound brain damage, and sometimes cases of death as well.   We’ve known of PML previously in patients with lymphoma and also in patients with untreated HIV infection who had severe and advancing immunosuppression. But we’ve seen this same PML condition in immunocompetent patients who have been treated with some of the agents that we might use for multiple sclerosis. This concern is not unique to MS, but it’s a concern with any immunotherapy that you use. The ability to measure whether a patient has previously been infected with a JC virus or not helps us in the risk-benefit balance considerations we have to make on behalf of our patients. It’s known that the absence of evidence of a JC virus infection is associated with a markedly decreased risk of PML, whereas its presence means that’s an active consideration in our prescribing.    Now that, I think, functions as a biomarker. Any time you might see an elevation of a measurable protein or another biomarker in general that normalizes with remission that gives you the opportunity to suggest that that either might be a therapeutic target – so let’s just call it protein X, for example, just for simplification and clarification. If a patient having an MS attack has a measurable increase in protein X in their blood which then now returns to normal or what had been their previous baseline in remission, that tells the clinician investigator that protein X might either be part of the immunologic cascade that causes the MS attack, and therefore suggests that the ability to intervene, down-regulate, or modify the expression of protein X may help with disease pathogenesis, OR it could also mean, or it could emerge as a candidate as a tool of assessment for disease status, so that one question we always have to ask as clinicians when we start patient on any given therapy or just in following them is how are they doing. Of course, that’s a primary mandate for the clinician taking care of patients.   Today, we do that by asking how they’re feeling, we strive to get into quality of life metrics with them, we also turn to their examination findings to look for interval change, and we look at MRI to see if there’s been a change there, with the hope that we’re seeing no evidence of disease activity. But the field of multiple sclerosis does not have its own version of a hemoglobin A1c, such as our endocrinologists have. In that scenario for those that aren’t familiar with it, A1c can be a value obtained literally with a single drop of blood that tells the practicing clinician caring for the patient what the average blood sugar of that patient has been over a substantial period of time prior to the time of their clinical encounter. So it helps the clinician make wise judgments and counsel to the patient regarding the optimum way to treat their diabetes, whether adjustments have to be made in their diet or in their prescription medications.   We don’t have such a thing in multiple sclerosis today. If we could find such a thing, it would make our care, I think, far superior in its quality. I think it would make physicians’ advice to our patients far more wise, and it would make the entire medical enterprise of caring for the MS patient less expensive, because we wouldn’t have to resort to important but still somewhat stodgy and expensive technologies like serial MRIs done with what could be high-frequency for the patient. Serial MRIs are safe for the patient, but you can see that if we could identify such a biomarker as that, if that were possible, I think that would have revolutionary implications for our care of the MS patient, not just in reducing medical costs – that’s an important goal – but the more important goal and what physicians need to focus on is superior advice, improved advice and counsel to the patients that are in our care.     MSDF So you and I are both old enough to remember when the Human Genome Project was proposed, and one of the values of the Human Genome Project that was articulated was that it would usher in an era of personalized medicine. Now it’s 13 years or so after the Human Genome Project has been completed, and, arguably, that promise has never been realized. How much longer will it take in multiple sclerosis to realize an era of personalized medicine?   Dr. Dunn The short answer is I don’t know, but there’s some important considerations to be made along the way. One fact is there are approximately 25,000 genes in the human body, but there are an estimated 500,000 proteins. The reason for the difference is that after an original protein is manufactured on the basis of the blueprint of DNA, it can be modified in transcription and translation. For those of you in your field, this would be post-production modifications. The same thing happens with proteins, and what that means is that the field of proteomics, you could argue, is 20 times more sensitive than the field of genomics if the ratio is 25,000 to 500,000 genes to proteins in the human body, respectively.   MS does have a genetic component, and that’s been proven by research in this past two decades by our country’s leading researchers, but the genetic input of MS is not the only answer; MS is only partially a genetic disease. It seems to be, in my own opinion and I think it’s shared by my colleagues – many of them, most of them perhaps – is that MS is primarily an environmental condition. The greatest risk of obtaining MS is not so much that family members are affected, though cases of that have happened and happen regularly, it seems to be more related to environment, where one lives. Now you may know that epidemiologically, MS is almost absent, or very sparse, at the equator, but in moving north and south on Earth, the greater that one moves away from the equator, the greater the prevalence of MS. And right about the 35th parallel or so both north and south of the equator, there appears to be a relatively large increase in how much MS there is. And that’s true, to the best of our knowledge, all the way around the world.   And so if MS is more of an environmental condition than a genetic one – although it’s both – then I think a genetic assay may be part, but not likely to be all of the answer, and the promise of going to a more sensitive assay to get into the post-transcription and post-translational modification that takes place in human molecules, which ultimately are the language of how the immune system affects our nervous system, is going to be and prove to be a more enriched and more promising field of inquiry.   MSDF I wonder if you can mention some of the labs that are doing the most promising work in this area.   Dr. Dunn I’m pleased to say that there are labs throughout the world that I think are doing research in this. Within the United States – I don’t want to leave anybody out – but I think that special kudos need to be given to the Mayo Clinic. I think on the east coast the Partners Program of the Harvard Medical Schools are very interested in this field; Johns Hopkins is doing work that I think is exemplary. Out west, our colleagues at UCSF. And, of course, I have to give special kudos to my colleagues at Stanford University. These are places that are publishing in translational medicine the bench-to-bedside framework in which discoveries that are being made at the level of the bench, there’s an active effort being made to try to translate that to human care. I’m very sensitive to the idea of excluding anybody, because I think that this is really an international search, and it’s going to require multilevel of collaboration. So I hope that as we go forward, we’ll be able to really work together.   I mentioned just a moment ago, I think practice of personalized medicine in this field is going to require not one discovery, it’s going to require a panel, perhaps, of different measurable biomarkers. I don’t anticipate one single lab is going to be able to discover all of those biomarkers, I think we’ll get one discovery from one place, one from another, one from another. And it’s going to require a transcendent collaboration between institutions and individuals and researchers and investigators to bring it all together for the collective good.   MSDF Dr. Dunn, thank you very much.   Dr. Dunn Okay, alright, thank you very much, Bob.   [transition music]   Thank you for listening to Episode Six of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This Podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Robert Finn. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   [outro music]

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller  Hello, and welcome to Episode Five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.    This week’s Podcast features an interview with Dr. Anne Cross, who reflects on the past year in MS research. But to begin, here’s a brief summary of some of the topics we’ve been covering on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.    Researchers have discovered that multiple sclerosis may have something in common with colon cancer; the Wnt pathway. It’s a genetic pathway important in development, stem cell maintenance, and cell differentiation. In colon cancer, the mutation of a mediator gene called APC causes the Wnt pathway to become overactive, leading to tumor formation. Now, researchers have discovered that a loss of function mutation of APC in the brain also leads to an overactive Wnt pathway, ultimately freezing oligodendrocyte progenitor cells in their undifferentiated state.    Next, what disease-modifying therapies should women start or stop before pregnancy? In our latest news synthesis, we discuss the difficulties many women with MS have in deciding when to stop DMT before trying to conceive. Since it can take months, and even years, for a woman to conceive, it’s important that she spend the least amount of time off medication as possible to reduce the chance of relapse. Some drugs may be worth taking during pregnancy anyway, but it’s up to the neurologist to do a risk-benefit analysis for each patient. Nevertheless, many women opt to go off of DMT altogether to reduce the risk of adverse effects on the fetus.   Finally, we would like to direct your attention to funding opportunities on the MSDF webpage. Under the Professional Resources tab at msdiscovery.org, you can find a listing of various organizations offering funding for research grants, fellowship grants, and more. Currently, there are several opportunities offered from ECTRIMS with deadlines this winter. There are also several deadlines for funding from the National MS Society coming up in August.    Now for the interview.   Interviewer – Bob Finn This is Bob Finn. I’m here with Dr. Anne Cross of the Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Cross will later today be giving a talk at the American Academy of Neurology meeting on what the year has been like in MS research. And, so, let me ask you briefly, what has the year been like? Has it been a good year, a bad year, an exciting year, a boring year?   Interviewee – Anne Cross  I think it’s been a pretty good year. There have been some mainly good things, a couple of bad things, some rather interesting and unexpected things, too. I guess some of the good things involve genetics research papers that have come out identifying genes that are associated with risk of developing MS. That’s been kind of exciting. Actually, there were 48 new genes that were identified and published this year by the International MS Genetics Consortium, which is a very large group of international researchers that have amassed probably close to 30,000 genetic samples from MS patients over the years that they’ve been in existence, which is about 10 years, plus close to double that of controls. And all these MS patient samples are from patients who were well characterized and submitted by, generally, MS specialists.    And that group did a study using something called the Immunochip, which is a genotyping array that was actually developed by a group of investigators who work on autoimmune disorders, so that array is very much weighted towards beings with immunologic function. So not too unexpectedly, all 48 of the newest identified genes all relate in some way to the immune system or are very closely linked to genes of immune function. But prior to that, the same group – the International MS Genetics Consortium – had identified about 50, a little over 50 genes that are associated with MS risk, and most of them were also related to genes of immune function. So I think together, all of this data certainly implicates the immune system, which we already knew, but I think things are certainly solidifying around that with the newest data.   MSDF  Let me ask you, if they’re using techniques that are specific for immunological genes, are they missing other genes?   Dr. Cross  They very well could be. The original studies that this group did which were published, the biggest study was published in the summer of 2011, did not do it in that fashion, though, they just did a genome-wide association study, and most of the genes that they identified were related to the immune system directly or indirectly. So, yes, I’m sure that some are being missed that aren’t related to the genes that are on this Immunochip microarray, but they’re trying to hone down a bit.    And some of the other things that were discovered were that, well, they identified 5 allelic variants; the particular allelic variant was over 50% of the time associated with risk of MS. And they also identified in this latest search – well, the strongest association was with a gene that has immune function called Vcl-10 – they actually in this latest search rediscovered the same 50 or so that they had discovered before, so they were actually mostly in this Immunochip microarray.   MSDF  So, aside from the genome-wide association studies, what else has been interesting in MS research this year?   Dr. Cross  Well, I think some of the clinical trials that have been published in the past year, and also that are just ongoing and aren’t published yet, have been interesting. This past week, Dr. Rhonda Voskuhl, who’s from UCLA, spoke and presented for the first time ever recent data from a study of estriol, which is a pregnancy hormone that was added to glatiramer acetate in women with relapsing-remitting MS, and that was compared to placebo pills added to glatiramer acetate. And the results were pretty positive, especially in the first year when there was an almost 50% reduction in relapse rate in the group that received estriol plus glatiramer. And, you know, that’s, of course, based upon longstanding data that we’ve known, that women with MS who have relapsing disease have a much decreased relapse rate during pregnancy. And then Dr. Voskuhl had done a good bit of work with estriol, in particular, which is a fairly safe pregnancy estrogen hormone compared to some of the others, but it’s not available in the United States right now.    MSDF  You mentioned that there were some disappoints.   Dr. Cross  At least for me, and probably for a lot of MS patients, the biggest disappointment was the failure of the FDA to approve a drug called alemtuzumab, which is a humanized monoclonal antibody against an antigen that’s on pretty much all the mononuclear cells of the immune system. And the US FDA failed to approve it, although, I believe, 32 countries and counting have approved it at this point, including Canada and Mexico and all of the countries of Western Europe, Australia, Brazil.   MSDF  Have there been any interesting developments on the remyelination front?   Dr. Cross  Yes, yes, yes. In fact, I hope to speak about that today. There are studies in early-phase trials right now of anti-LINGO-1, which is a humanized monoclonal antibody against a molecule called LINGO-1, which is found only in the central nervous system – at least that’s what the data says so far – and it’s expressed by oligodendroglial cells, or the cells that make central nervous system myelin. And, for whatever reason, it’s involved in inhibiting remyelination in the central nervous system. So the monoclonal antibody that inhibits it then enhances remyelination. And in mouse models it looked very good, and it also led to less injury to axons, or nerve fibers, so it had more than just a remyelinating effect. And it’s now in phase II studies in relapsing-remitting MS and optic neuritis patients. At least the relapsing-remitting MS study is fully enrolled, and so we’ll be looking forward to those results.   So another potential remyelinating agent is a little bit behind anti-LINGO-1. It’s called recombinant human IgM22, and it was developed from a natural IgM antibody that was discovered at Mayo Clinic that binds to a surface antigen on oligodendrocytes – the cells that make central nervous system myelin – and it enhances myelination in mouse models of demyelination, and, in fact, in some studies, just a single dose of that led to longstanding remyelination in the mouse model. So that’s in dose-finding studies in human beings at the present time, and hopefully will move forward from there.   Other exciting things, at least to me, are studies of stem cells that can be differentiated into different types of cells. And, at this point, you can actually take human skin cells or human fibroblasts and revert them back to stem cells; they’re called induced pluripotent stem cells. So you can actually take a person’s skin and do that, and then you can differentiate it forward into whatever cell type you want, really, these days; I mean, you can differentiate them into neurons. And in MS, we’re very interested in differentiating them into oligodendrocyte precursor cells – cells that form the cells that make central nervous system myelin.    And a study that I plan to talk about this afternoon took such cells and made them into human oligodendrocyte precursor cells and put them into the central nervous systems of mice who had a genetic mutation in myelin basic proteins, so they are essentially unmyelinated. And these mice die very soon after being born, much earlier than normal, and they put these human cells in. They had to immunosuppress the mice so that they’d accept the human cells. But these cells actually made myelin, and it was functional myelin at least from the standpoint of wrapping around fairly normal-looking nerve fibers, axons, from the mice, and forming compact, normal-appearing myelin. So that particular group, they’re from New York State and they’re affiliated with several other medical centers, and they plan to get this into humans pretty soon. Their first project, however, is going to involve fetal stem cells first, because that was easier to get approved and moved forward on, and so I believe they’re already funded to do a three-center – all in New York State – stem cell study injecting such cells into the central nervous system of people with secondary progressive MS.    MSDF  Now some patients aren’t waiting for the studies, I understand, but what is your point-of-view about that?   Dr. Cross  It depends on where they’re going and what they’re doing. I personally think there’s some shoddy research, some charlatans you might call them, out there who are taking the money and presenting false hopes to patients that I certainly disagree with. And I have one particular patient I know who went to another country and had stem cell therapy done in what she described as a very dirty environment. And luckily nothing bad happened to her from this experience, but nothing good happened either. I’m hoping that she’ll be able to get into some of these well-done, scientifically valid, protocol-driven studies that seem to have some promise.    MSDF  Any other interesting areas of MS research in the past year?   Dr. Cross  I think the unexpected finding that I plan to talk about is an association of salt – sodium in particular, the sodium component of sodium chloride – in the development of a particular type of pathogenic T-cell that at least is related to the mouse model of MS called experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. These are Th17 cells and they’ve been shown to, at least in some models, cause the EAE model for MS. And it was found that if you increase the salt intake of mice that had been induced to develop this model and compared them to mice who weren’t getting extra salt in their diet, that the mice who got extra salt got disease earlier; they had a more severe course, they didn’t recover as well, and they had histologically when you looked at their central nervous systems, more cells infiltrating and just more damaging. So that was kind of interesting and quite unexpected, I would say.    Two different groups of investigators sort of came up with that at the same time; I’m sure they were speaking to each other about it, that the studies came out right together. It certainly would be a modifiable environmental thing if it proves to be true, and perhaps even a little bit simple. And there is actually a scientific reason behind why this might occur. Well, there’s a response in the body by something called p38 MAP kinase in response to, like, many different stresses, but including among them osmotic stress which increased salt could cause. And that pathway that p38 MAP kinase is involved in eventually can lead to the induction of a particular kinase that is key to the development of Th17 cells. So it sort of all, you know, fits together.    There are certainly some things that don’t fit with that. I think that certain areas of the world, for example, have very high salt intake and yet have low MS rates, but it may be that there’s this environmental factor. There probably are many different environmental factors that’s going together with a genetic predisposition, and those together are probably leading, perhaps, to MS. In any event, this will have to be proven by other groups, but if the association is true, it would certainly be modifiable.     MSDF  So looking ahead into the next year of MS research, what are you particularly looking forward to seeing?   Dr. Cross  I’d like to see more data come out on some of the other oral agents; there are a couple that are in the pipeline that are being looked at that perhaps have other mechanisms of actions from what we have now. I’d like to see other studies funded for estriol so that perhaps it could come to the United States and be an adjunctive therapy probably for women with MS and probably pretty safe. I’m really hopeful – I’m not sure if it’ll be in the next year – that we’ll see some good data coming out from these scientifically valid stem cells projects to help people with progressive MS, and help people who have longstanding disability to recover some function; those are the people that really, really need help in the MS world right now.   MSDF  Well, Dr. Cross, thank you very much.   Dr. Cross  Thank you.   [transition music]   Thank you for listening to Episode Five of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This Podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Robert Finn. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.    Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   [outro music]   

[intro music]  Host – Dan Keller   Hello, and welcome to Episode Four of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.  This week’s Podcast features an interview with Dr. Michael Racke about the potassium channel Kir4.1 and its potential role in MS. But to begin, here’s a brief summary of some of the topics we’ve been covering on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.    Researchers at the University of California San Francisco have developed a new remyelination assay that allows high through-put drug screening. The assay takes advantage of oligodendrocyte’s tendency to wrap myelin around anything axon-shaped, such as plastic fibers and microscopic glass pillars. The assay has already identified several FDA-approved drugs as candidates for remyelination therapies, including an over-the-counter antihistamine now in phase II clinical trials.   In another article, we report on a new study that sheds light on the ameliorating effect of ultraviolet rays on inflammation and disease progression in mouse models of MS. In the study, MS patients sat in a therapeutic UV chamber for five sessions a week for six weeks. Even after one session, the patients had an increase in dendritic cells and regulatory T-cells. In follow-up studies with EAE mice, the researchers uncovered a possible mechanism by which these regulatory T-cells migrate to the central nervous system.   In addition to covering the latest in MS research, the MS Discovery Forum also curates news stories from around the web in our twice-weekly Research Roundup. Last week we wrote about the findings in phase III trials of daclizumab, a legal dispute between drug companies Acorda and Actavis, and a new collection of immunology papers from the journal PLOS. We also posted some social media advice as well as the amusing hashtag #yomanuscipt. Our favorite tweet: Yomanuscript is so bad the null hypothesis rejected it. Check out Research Roundup under the news brief section in the News and Future Directions tab on our website.   [transition music]   Now to the interview. Dr. Michael Racke is the Chair of the Department of Neurology at the medical school at Ohio State University. He’s here to discuss the latest findings of the potassium channel known as Kir4.1 and its implications for MS. MS Discovery’s Executive Editor, Bob Finn, spoke with Dr. Racke.    MSDF Dr. Racke, welcome. Dr. Racke Thanks.  MSDF So what is Kir4.1? Dr. Racke   So Kir4.1 is a what’s called a potassium inward rectifying channel that’s expressed on the end-feed of astrocytes and also on oligodendrocytes. And so it’s important for trying to adjust the right concentration of potassium in and outside of a cell.  MSDF   And what is its relationship to MS? Dr. Racke   Well, there’s been a lot of interest recently. There was a paper published in the New England Journal now almost a year and a half ago, I believe, from Bernhard Hemmer’s group that showed that about 50% of MS patients have antibodies directed against this potassium channel, Kir4.1. MSDF   And is that a lot more than people without MS? Dr. Racke   Right. So when they looked at healthy individuals or looked at patients with not just neuroimmunologic diseases but also other non-inflammatory diseases, the number of antibodies directed against it was very low, on the order of magnitude of like 3%.  MSDF   So what does this mean for our research in MS?  Dr. Racke   You know, for a long time people have been interested in what are the potential targets, and this would represent a little bit different target than the typical myelin proteins that one has thought of as being targets in MS. It’s also kind of interesting because of another molecule, aquaporin 4, that is expressed in the same place in the astrocytic endfeet that’s been the antibody target for neuromyelitis optica. And so I think as we begin to see responses against some of these other molecules, it’s interesting to see whether they result in in demyelination and whether that can be a new avenue for therapeutic intervention.  MSDF   Just within the last week, another study came to a quite different conclusions regarding the prevalence of Kir4.1 autoantibodies in MS. How do you resolve the discrepancy? Dr. Racke   There was data presented yesterday to suggest that one of the differences may actually be differences in glycosylation of Kir4.1. It turns out that eukaryotes—and humans are eukaryotes obviously—glycosylate proteins, and that very often glycosylated protein looks very different to the immune system than an unglycosylated protein. And since a lot of these studies take an unusual cell type and then try to over-express to your 4.1 on its surface and then see whether an antibody recognizes it, it may not be the same type of glycosylation that’s actually seen within patients with MS. MSDF   There’s a lot of research going on now on Kir4.1. What more needs to be done in this area before Kir4.1 becomes a therapeutic target?  Dr. Racke   Right. Well, so, for example, if you look at neuromyelitis optica, that if you did plasmic change in those patients, then very often those patients are benefited. So it’s as though if I take away those antibodies the patient does be better, so those antibodies are pathogenic. When that’s been done in MS, the data, it’s sort of been, I don’t want to say controversial, but in some sense it is. And then there have been studies, for example, done from the Mayo Clinic that looked in at certain types of demyelinating events where it seemed like plasma exchange did work, then there were larger studies that were done and it didn’t seem to work. And if, in fact, it’s, say, a pa a patient population where really only one-third to half of the patients have the pathogenic antibody, then if I do that study and say I’m going to do it to everybody, it may not have enough power to suggest that there’s efficacy for everybody. But I think it gets back also to this idea of what a lot of people talk about in personalized medicine, right, and the idea may be that you would be able to identify patients that perhaps had an antibody to Kir4.1, and then perhaps they would be more amenable to therapeutic interventions that targeted antibody synthesis in the blood. MSDF   Do you think that interventions targeted at Kir4.1, would that would it work much the same way as other as existing therapies in decreasing the number of relapses in re relapsing-remitting MS? Dr. Racke   For example, if you look at things like interferon, natalizumab, the way those therapies are trying to work isn’t against the specific antigen, right. What they’re really trying to do is just interrupt the disease process. And I think the difference is going to be there have been some studies where people were trying to target the specific epitopes to either myelin basic protein – the altered peptide ligand studies were like that – and there’s studies now also where people have solubilized MHC molecule that has a myelin peptide on it. And those are specifically trying to target the immune response against a very specific antigen. Now I have to say that most of those things haven’t really worked very well, and I think part of the reason is that the human immune response is complicated enough, but by the time a person has had several attacks in MS, they probably are making an immune response against a number of myelin antigens, and so if I target just a single antigen it may not work. And that may also end up being true in in terms of Kir4.1, that it’s just going to be another thing. But, I mean, if there’s enough similarities between it and some of the things that we’ve seen with neuromyelitis optica in aquaporin 4, like I say, there the plasma exchange and targeting the B-cell response in many instances has been quite beneficial to pa patients, right. And so I think that’s going to be an important next step to not just demonstrate that it can be part of the target that happens in multiple sclerosis, but whether inhibiting that response to that target actually has therapeutic benefit.    MSDF   You just outlined one area of research on Kir4.1 that needs to go forward. What are some others? Dr. Racke The other issues have to do with trying to understand exactly the cell-type specificity in terms of glycosylation, trying to understand why is it that this particular channel is a target in MS, then are other channels also targets in MS. This sort of opens up a whole other ballgame in terms of diversity of targets that could potentially participate in MS pathogenesis. MSDF   Is there anything else you’d like to add about Kir4.1 that we haven’t already talked about? Dr. Racke   I’ve been in this field for 20 years, and realistically this has been the first new antigen that really has come up. And that’s sort of interesting in and of its own right. I think the other thing, obviously, for those people who are interested in things like molecular mimicry, this gives you another molecule to begin to look at in terms of its sequence homology with infectious agents. I mean, the people who are interested in, you know, viruses like HHV-6 and Epstein-Barr viruses, and those that they think that have an important role potentially in MS pathogenesis, how might infections with those agents affect Kir4.1 expression. That’s going to be another area that’ll be of interest to the research community in MS. MSDF   Well, Dr. Racke, thank you very much.  Dr. Racke   You’re welcome.  [transition music]   Thank you for listening to Episode Four of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This Podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Robert Finn. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.    Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.    We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.    [outro music]  

[intro music]   Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode Three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.   This week’s Podcast features an interview with investigators Daren Austin and Susan Van Meter of the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, who will discuss results from the MIRROR trial of ofatumumab, a human monoclonal antibody already FDA approved for leukemia. But to begin, here’s a brief summary of some of the topics we’ve been covering on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.   First, a complementary approach to treating MS. A new study lends support to the prevailing theory that the immune system’s ancient complement system drives persistent axon damage between MS relapses. The complement system consists of proteins that can activate innate and adaptive immune responses, but have a poorly understood role in autoimmune diseases. The new results suggest that anticomplement therapies might help prevent damage to axons. Clinical trials are in the early planning phases, but one of the study’s authors cautions that even if this approach proves valuable, it would be used in addition to and not in place of therapies targeting inflammatory T-cells.   In a second article, we report on a study suggesting that inhibiting a common cytokine called granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor – GM-CSF – might be a new therapeutic target to treat MS. Studies have shown an association between the cytokine and MS flares. A newly described class of T helper cells produce GM-CSF, and inhibiting that production might be helpful in preventing flares.   Finally, we’d like to call your attention to our blog series called “MS Patient, Ph.D.” There are numerous blogs and other websites where people with MS talk with other people with MS. And there are also a few, including our own MS Discovery Forum, where MS researchers and clinicians talk with other researchers and clinicians. But we can’t think of any sites where people with MS who have a scientific bent communicate directly with researchers and clinicians. That’s what MS Patient, Ph.D. is all about. It’s a place where two articulate people struggling with MS, both of them Ph.D. biologists, present their points of view about their disease and about the state of MS research. You’ll find some of their opinions provocative and controversial, and we hope you’ll join the discussion. In our two most recent posts, Griselda Zuccarino-Catania discussed the snake oil treatments touted as MS cures and relates that to the recent testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee by Dr. Mehmet Oz. And Emily Willingham discusses conflicting evidence on whether exercise is good or bad for people with MS.   [transition music]   Now, onto the interview. Here at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, we caught up with Dr. Daren Austin of GSK in London. He’s presenting the MIRROR study, which is a randomized, placebo-controlled study doing dose-ranging on ofatumumab in subjects with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis.   Interviewer – MSDF What led you to implicate B-cells? We often think of T-cells as a target in multiple sclerosis.   Dr. Austin Well, there’d been previous work using other anti-CD20 therapies in immune inflammation diseases that have shown efficacy. Most notably the first was rituximab in rheumatoid arthritis and subsequently rheumatoid looking at multiple sclerosis, so the precedence for anti-CD20 modulation as a target for inflammatory diseases was known before we came to design this study. What wasn’t known before we designed the MIRROR study was how much modulation of B-cells would generate what level of clinical benefit. The primary objective of this study really was to look at how best we could administer ofatumumab, which is an anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody, to modulate B-cells and then modulate clinical disease.   MSDF How’d you go about it? Can you describe the study and also what you found?   Dr. Austin Well, the study was a randomized, double-blind, parallel group study looking at relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients who had to have evidence of disease activity, i.e., they they would be requiring therapy. What we did was we took what we knew about the pharmacology of ofatumumab – and we’d previously conducted both an intravenous study in in multiple sclerosis patients, so we knew the drug could be efficacious in suppressing MRI lesions, and we took what we knew about the clinical pharmacology of ofatumumab; and, namely, that it is an extremely potent depleter of B-cells. We began by by hypothesizing that there was a link between the level of B-cell suppression and the level of MRI lesion suppression. From that we produced some some predictions. And our predictions led us to suggest that extremely low doses given relatively infrequently could be beneficial. We produced a transimulation before we conducted the trial, and we proposed a range of doses and dosing frequencies. So the first dose level was was placebo, the next level was a 3 mg dose that was given once every 12 weeks. The next dose level was 30 mg given once every 12 weeks. The next dose level was 60 mg given once every 12 weeks. And, finally, because we knew that a dose of 200 mg was efficacious over 12 weeks, we gave 60 mg every 4 weeks to give a cumulative dose of 180 mg. So we explored a dose range, a cumulative dose range, of 3 mg to 180 mg, with the primary endpoint being evaluation of MRI lesions at 12 weeks. Placebo patients were then given a 3 mg active dose. All patients were then followed for a further 12 weeks, and we now have the 24-week data. And, again, treatment then ceased and patients were followed-up to see repletion of B-cells.   And what we found in the study was, yes, that ofatumumab is is extremely potent at depleting B-cells. That single 3 mg dose was capable of knocking out about 75% of circulating B-cells, and the 60 mg dose given every 4 weeks depleted almost all patients right down to the undetectable levels, which is had been seen in the past. What we were able to do then is to look at the dose response to dosing of ofatumumab at the 12-week endpoint, and what we found is that at the cumulative dose of 180 mg, we see over 90% suppression of lesions. But we found that there was no incremental benefit in going above doses of about 60 mg, and in fact the dose that generated the half maximum effect from an analysis of the data was predicted to be less than 3 mg; a single 3 mg dose generated half of the maximum benefit.   Having shown that we have got clinical suppression of MRI lesions, we then decided to relay the pharmacology of ofatumumab, which is suppression of B-cells, to the clinical benefit, which is suppression of MRI lesions. And that was the purpose of this abstract, that the analysis that we presented showed quite clearly that there was a very strong relationship between how much you suppress B-cells and how much you suppress MRI lesions. But the surprising thing from this data is that you don’t have to fully deplete all patients to below the limit of quantification to derive benefit. We showed using a variety of analyses that patients that have circulating B-cells of less than 32 to 64 cells per microliter on average over the course of the dosing interval would still derive maximal benefit, i.e., suppression of lesions, to 90%. And that’s intriguing. And the reason it’s intriguing is that the doses that we gave are only acting on peripheral B-cells. There’s been speculation as to where the drug needs to get to give clinical benefit, and that the doses that we give – up to 60 mg doses – the drug can’t penetrate the blood-brain barrier. And, therefore, we know that by modulating peripheral circulating B-cells, we are deriving the maximal benefit in suppression of MRI lesions.   MSDF Is the drug acting on mature B-cells, or in B-cell development which may then migrate into the CNS during development?   Dr. Austin So ofatumumab only binds to the cells that express CD20, so there is some consideration as to where those cells exist. Now it is entirely possible that immature cells maybe sort of enter the periphery not expressing CD20, move to across the blood-brain barrier where they subsequently develop. That is a possibility. And if that is the case, our drug is not capable of reaching those B-cells. Only cells that express CD20 are depleted, so plasmablasts, for example, are not depleted because they do not express CD20. It is just that that population of of of B-cells that are expressing CD20. There’s a lot of hypotheses about how B-cells are working, how they may be producing pathogenic antibodies that may be detrimental. In MS it could be anti-myelin antibodies, for example. But we don’t absolutely know that that is the sole pathogenic mechanism in MS, as in other diseases. It may well be that B-cells are modulating other, say, T-cell activity, which we do not yet know. What we do know from our trial is that modulation of peripheral B-cells gives you benefit, and that’s the principal finding, and that the doses that we modulate at are much, much lower than the oncology doses that have previously been given.   MSDF So you don’t yet know whether you have a direct antibody effect on B-cells, or whether it’s acting possibly through antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity.   Dr. Austin We do know that the mechanism of B-cell depletion is through both ADCC and complement-dependent cytotoxicity. That is the primary pharmacology of ofatumumab on cells that express CD20. We do not and cannot say for certain what those B-cells were doing prior to being depleted and how they were driving the pathogenic process, but we have shown that by depleting them to levels of less than 32 cells per microliter, you see suppression of disease activity. One of the important things to say is that the regimens at the every 12-week dosing that we’d selected, there is some evidence that B-cells do start to grow back in at least half of patients, so dosing every 12 weeks pre-dose, there are some circulating B-cells. If we look at immature B-cells, there are lots of immature B-cells but they haven’t yet moved to the to express CD20. So what we see is that the regimens we’ve designed, there is some evidence of of repletion, i.e., that patients are seeing clinical benefit despite having circulating B-cells.   MSDF How does this fit in with the pathogenetic mechanisms of T-cells? Are there interactions in the pathologic process besides the regulatory effect of T-cells themselves?   Dr. Austin The truth is I don’t think we can say. All we can say is that modulation of B-cells circulating in the periphery gives clinical suppression of of MRI lesions, and by implication we believe at the clinical efficacy in multiple sclerosis, and possibly other diseases, although such low doses have not have yet to be tested in other diseases.   MSDF In terms of B-cell repletion, have you also followed new lesions after B-cells come back?   Dr. Austin We have the 24-week data and we have preliminary data out to 48 weeks, and that data won’t be reported yet because we’re still in the process of ana analyzing it. But in the trial we designed, we had individual follow-up to watch patients B-cell replete back up to the lower limit of normal or their baseline, and we are measuring their follow on MRI lesions.   MSDF Working along with Dr. Austin on this project is Dr. Susan Van Meter, the clinical physician involved in the project. Let me ask you, what sort of adverse effects did you see during the trial?   Dr. Van Meter The most common adverse effect that we saw was injection site reactions, and that can include things such as redness at the injection site, nausea, flu-like symptoms. That occurred in most of the patients receiving ofatumumab. It also, very interestingly, occurred in about 15% of patients who received placebo.   MSDF In terms of the more serious and chronic effects, did you see any opportunistic infections or especially progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy?   Dr. Van Meter So you would certainly worry about infections, especially serious infections. We did not see any cases of PML or other opportunistic infections, and, in fact, no serious infections. As typical for patients with MS, patients did have a variety of infections – urinary tract infections, respiratory infections – but this was seen in all patients including placebo patients, and there was really no evidence of an increased rate of infection in patients receiving ofatumumab.   MSDF What do you see as the potential clinical significance of these findings?   Dr. Van Meter Well, I think it offers another therapy option for patients with MS. Obviously, we have to do further development and show that the benefits that we saw on MRI translate into clinical benefit on relapse rates and disability progression. But we’re offering a subcutaneous dose as opposed to an intravenous dose of medication, and potentially offering a medication that doesn’t completely wipe out one part of your immune system.   MSDF Is there a reason for selecting ofatumumab over rituximab?   Dr. Van Meter Well, I think that would be a clinician choice, to be honest. Rituximab has certainly been studied for multiple sclerosis even though it’s not indicated for multiple sclerosis. There’s another B-cell therapy that will be on the market when we launch, ocrelizumab, and I think it will come down to physician and patient choice.   MSDF Is there anything we’ve missed or that’s important to add?   Dr. Van Meter Well, I think at Glaxo we are very excited about this data; this is new science. Obviously, we need to understand more about it, replicate it. But for the first time, we’ve shown that you don’t need to completely destroy all the B-cells to have effect in multiple sclerosis.   MSDF Very good, I appreciate it. Thank you.   [transition music]   Thank you for listening to Episode Three of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This Podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Robert Finn. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.   Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   [outro music]

Transcript of Episode 2 with Dr. Barbara Koppel   [intro music] Host – Dan Keller  Hello, and welcome to Episode Two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller.  This week’s Podcast features an interview with Dr. Barbara Koppel, whose recent review of published studies concluded that certain forms of medical cannabis can be helpful in treating some symptoms of multiple sclerosis. But first, here is a brief summary of some of the topics we’ve been covering on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org.  First, predicting MS risk. Cardiologists can use the Framingham risk assessment tool to predict the likelihood that one of their patients will develop heart disease. But what about MS? Given that researchers have now found 110 genes related to MS risk, are we close to a formula that can predict who will develop MS and what course it will take? Disappointingly, the answer is probably not. Reporter Emily Willingham writes that “Decoding MS risk factors is less like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle and more like balancing a Jenga tower, with layer upon layer of complex interactions and unpredictable outcomes if something changes.” For those of you who may not be familiar with Jenga, it’s a children’s game popular around the world that involves balancing wooden blocks in the form of a tall tower; our article includes a helpful photo.  Next, what does the nose know about MS? Maybe a lot. Many people with MS lose their sense of smell, and now a new study involving postmortem brain samples appears to show that, contrary to earlier studies, the olfactory system is the site of significant demyelination and axonal loss. Could it be that the olfactory system is an important link between environmental exposures and MS? Stay tuned.  Finally, we’ve just posted our newest data visualization. This one is a scientific literature treemap that makes it easy to zoom in on peer-reviewed articles or clinical trial listings describing randomized, double-blind MS trials. Our own extensively researched drug development pipeline provided the source material for this visualization.  [transition music] Now, onto the interview. Dr. Barbara Koppel is Chief of Neurology at Metropolitan Hospital in New York and Professor of Clinical Neurology at New York Medical College. Along with Dr. Gary Gronseth of the University of Kansas School of Medicine, she conducted a systematic review of the literature on treating MS and other neurological diseases with medical marijuana. I caught up with Dr. Koppel at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Philadelphia. MSDF First of all, let me ask you why do you use the term marijuana? Most people around the world use cannabis?  Dr. Koppel  There is a difference, there’s a technical difference. Cannabis, I think, only refers to some of the derivatives, and we thought medical marijuana, more people would connect with that, they would know what we were talking about; the current buzzword, but it also refers to both pills and smoked and everything else.   MSDF  And what did you look at in review, what forms of medical marijuana or compounds? Dr. Koppel  The reviews went back to studies since 1948, and the compounds that were used were pills, an oral mucosal spray that’s called nabiximols that I’d never heard of but it’s used in England, and then a few of the studies covered smoked marijuana which were marijuana cigarettes basically. MSDF  And what did you find, specifically the use of it for multiple sclerosis? Dr. Koppel  There is symptoms that it helped. It was most efficacious in spasticity, in reducing spasticity – more on the patient-related scales than the doctor Ashforth scale – but in depending on which study we looked at, the pills helped and the spray would help. It was also useful in reducing pain levels, either pain from spasms or pain from central causes – you know, burning numbness type of pain – and it reduced the number of voids, bladder voids, but some of the other bladder symptoms it had no effect on. It didn’t help tremor, which is also good to know because now we have to keep looking for other things for tremor in MS. Then we looked at other diseases, but most of the work has been done in MS. MSDF  Right now in the US there’s only one form, a pill form, approved. Do you think that you had sufficient data to make any conclusions or recommendations? Dr. Koppel  The pill forms that are available here, they’re not approved for anything other than chemotherapy-induced nausea and appetite in AIDS patients, so they were used in some of the studies and they were useful for spasticity, again, and painful spasms. The problem is that the pills are primarily THC rather than cannabinoid, so it’s hard to get up to a dose that’s working without the toxicity that comes along with THC; they they weren’t all that great. The one study using smoked marijuana was in the US, and they used marijuana cigarettes which trended towards efficacy, but the study didn’t have enough power to make any conclusions from; there weren’t enough patients basically. MSDF  Is the oral spray – which isn’t available in the US – a different composition, and does it have any differences in effect or advantages? Dr. Koppel  It has a big advantage because it’s a combination of cannabinoid – which is the part of the cannabis that you want to reduce symptoms – and THC. And the psychoactive side effects usually come from the THC as opposed to the cannabinoid, although it does have some psychoactivity as well. So the main advantages that I could find is that patients could self-titrate; they could use up to a certain numbers of pumps a day. But if they felt better with two or three pumps, they could stay at that dose. If it didn’t work at that dose, they could go up to six or seven – I forgot – the maximum. So I think that was found to be more effective, just because patients could take a dose that was adequate. It is going to be studied here, it’s the company has got testing sites mostly for epilepsy now, but it will become available here. MSDF  Have you found either in practice or from any studies whether patients were reporting self-medicating, especially with smoked form? Dr. Koppel  Yeah. The We couldn’t use those studies to make this systematic review because no one really examined them and they’re just basically testimonials or questionnaires, but there was a lot of literature that included that. And, in fact, one of the earlier papers from England, that’s why they began looking at more suitable forms of cannabis, because their patients were self-medicating by smoking, you know, just regular old marijuana and reporting that to their doctors, and and then the doctors tried to translate that into a pill form or a spray form that could be looked at more rigorously. And my patients in New York, you know, they they’re not shy. I don’t have a big MS practice, so my patients are more likely to be seizure patients. It’s not that they use it for their seizures. Every once in a while they’ll ask me if it’s okay, if it’s going to cause seizures or withdrawal, like alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures. And I can now tell them, no, it’s safe enough from that point of view. MSDF  I think you had mentioned in a news conference that there were 2 out of something like 623 patients who had did have seizure that might be attributed to use of the drug, so I take it that does not concern you. Are those small numbers, especially since you’re dealing with patients with epilepsy? Dr. Koppel  Yeah, those are small numbers. And what I’ve found is that they used to say patients with MS didn’t get seizures, but they do. There were actually four seizures that were reported, and two they didn’t blame on the drug; so they were either in the placebo group or they were patients that already had seizures. But it’s always something to worry about, but it’s such a small number that I wasn’t concerned. MSDF  While we’re on the subject, what other adverse effects did the studies you reviewed note? Dr. Koppel  The common ones that appeared in at least two two papers were things like nausea, fatigue, dizziness, fainting. In some of the studies that used the more potent forms that had more THC, they had hallucinations and depression and suicidal thoughts, but no one actually did commit suicide during the studies. MSDF  Is this a problem in MS since some of these types of symptoms or problems occur with the disease itself, could these be exacerbating it or are they directly related, do you think, to use of the drug? Dr. Koppel  That makes it complicated and that’s why you need kind of rigorous studies so that you can compare dose effects and things like that. But if a patient already has cognitive impairment, they may have trouble dealing with the side effects that, you know, that I mentioned. It’s easy to confuse that issue with the heavy users, the recreational users who end up with cognitive impairment that can be permanent. These were doses that were nothing like what people use for fun. MSDF  If this works out that it would be a useful form of drug if testing shows validity, who do you see it being recommended for? People refractory to certain other medications, or how would it be used? Dr. Koppel  That was the case with all the studies, they were allowed to try everything there was up to that point and kind of added this marijuana as a last-ditch effort. So I would say if a patient’s got uncontrolled spasticity or too much pain, they should try it. I wouldn’t really recommend it for bladder issues because it wasn’t that successful, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it if tremor was the symptom they were trying to get rid of. So it just depends on what the patient’s telling you is bothering them the most. And, obviously, the patient has to be willing to assume all the side effects. I think one of the good things about this is some of the stigma is possibly going away so that… There’s a lot of people who assume that patients that want to try it, it’s just because they want an excuse to, you know, use recreational marijuana and get high, and it it really wasn’t the case in the studies. MSDF  It seems like it’s long past due to be rigorously testing these things. Dr. Koppel  Yes, I I agree. It has been tested in other disease states, this is just a piece of the pie where marijuana is used. It’s been used on patients with intractable pain from cancer or people with glaucoma have benefited from it; there’s usage out there. And the states that have legalized it, they don’t care which condition it’s being prescribed for. So I think it’s just neurology’s kind of lagged behind because it’s been so hard to do research on it in this country. Even in England where a lot of the studies were done, they put into their reports that it wasn’t easy to get approval. It’s not legal there either, but I guess they just were more persistent in studying it.  MSDF  Since in most of the studies that you reviewed, it was used sort of as a last resort or an add-on later, would you see that as its primary role or could it take a more prominent role? Dr. Koppel  As I said, I usually treat seizures, and what I try to do is not pile on one pill after another pill. If something seems to work, I’ll take away something that wasn’t working. So I think that’s the role for it, because if you take everything you’re going to definitely accumulate the side effects and then you really have trouble functioning. So I think if this works better than some of the existing treatments, there’s no reason to take both of them. Let me just add, it still shouldn’t be your first-line treatment, you you should still try the traditional ones first. And mon many of these trials only lasted 8 weeks; you don’t need forever to decide if something’s helping or not. MSDF  What would be the message to physicians who contemplate advising patients about medical marijuana? Dr. Koppel  I can’t tell them to go ahead and prescribe it because – for two reasons – I don’t really love the form that’s available here because it’s all THC, and it’s not FDA-approved for these conditions, so they’re still taking a chance on breaking that rule. I would advise physicians to find trials or to do a trial rather than just tell patients… even in the states where a doctor can give a card that says they agree with using medical marijuana, you you lose control of the dose and how much how much the patient smokes, and all that. So I would encourage some more traditional pills and sprays to be studied so that then they could be prescribed. MSDF  Should these prescriptions, or recommendations, really come with either informal or formal informed consent about side effects and possible things to avoid doing, like driving? Dr. Koppel  We should probably do that on a lot more pills that we’re currently prescribing. I I don’t always routinely do it, but the pharmacy tends to hand out a list of dos and don’ts, and some of the bottles are labeled don’t drive. It’s not that different from other CNS-depressing drugs, but it’s worth warning people. And, actually, I think it shows up in their urine, so if they’re going to go somewhere where a tox screen might get done, they they should have a card or a prescription that shows that it was prescribed. MSDF  This systematic review is being published in the Journal of Neurology on April 29th, and also, I guess, it’s already been endorsed by certain societies, medical societies? Dr. Koppel  They sent a summary of the findings to, I guess, other other societies that deal with the same conditions, because in addition to MS, we studied Parkinson’s and Huntington’s and Tourette’s and seizures, even though there were only two studies for that. So some of the other societies have not confirmed it but endorsed it in the sense that they agree with what we found. MSDF  I appreciate it. [transition music] Thank you for listening to Episode Two of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This Podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum, MSDF, the premier source of independent news and information on MS research. MSDF’s executive editor is Robert Finn. Msdiscovery.org is part of the nonprofit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is Vice President of Scientific Operations.    Msdiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances.   We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.   [outro music]          

Multiple Sclerosis Discovery: The Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum Transcript of Episode 1 with Dr. Timothy Vollmer [intro music] Host – Dan Keller Hello, and welcome to Episode One of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery, the Podcast of the MS Discovery Forum. I’m your host, Dan Keller. This week’s Podcast features an interview with Dr. Timothy Vollmer, who discusses strategies for maximizing brain health in people with MS. But first, here is a brief summary of some of the topics we’ve been covering on the MS Discovery Forum at msdiscovery.org. First, oral contraceptives. According to a retrospective study published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, women with relapsing remitting MS who used combined oral contraceptives tended to have less severe disease, and they were less likely to move on to secondary progressive MS. On the other hand, this study showed no association between oral contraceptives and annualized relapse rates or EDSS scores. An intriguing set of associations, but correlation does not imply causation. Next, the blood brain barrier. A study in PLOS ONE showed that when cultured blood-brain barrier cells are treated with serum from MS patients the cells decrease their production of tight junction molecules and increase their production of cell adhesion molecules that promote cell migration. Breakdown of the blood-brain barrier is an early feature of MS, and this allows activated leukocytes to migrate into the brain. Understanding this process is important in its own right, but the study also raises questions about the safety of blood donations from people with MS. Does this study suggest that people with MS should be barred from donating blood? Let us know your opinion in the comments. Finally, we hope you’ll check out our new data visualization section, which will allow you to see MS-related data in new ways. Our first visualization is a bubble chart presenting data from 106 MS clinical trials published between 1986 and April 2014 involving 44,606 patients. You can easily sort the data by compound, by trial phase, by dose, by year, by funding, or by population. Please let us know if you discover something unexpected or particularly striking in the data. [transition music] Now, onto the interview. Dr. Timothy Vollmer is a practicing neurologist specializing in MS. He’s also professor and director of clinical research at the University of Colorado Denver. Bob Finn, our executive editor, caught up with Dr. Vollmer at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Denver. Interviewer – Bob Finn This is Bob Finn from the MS Discovery Forum. I'm here with Dr. Timothy Vollmer of the University of Colorado Denver Rocky Mountain MS Center, who among other things is interested in how to maximize lifelong brain health in people with MS. Dr. Vollmer, welcome. Interviewee – Timothy Vollmer Thank you. MSDF Why is now a good time to ask about maximizing brain health? Dr. Vollmer Well two reasons: one is because recent research has indicated that there are both medical ways and lifestyle ways to actually improve brain health, and the the data suggests that if we do that that's going to improve people's function later in life and allow them to be the grandparents that they want to be or other things that they want to do later in life. And the second reason is is that we now have nine FDA approved therapies to alter the course of MS by inhibiting the inflammation that causes the damage in the brain. And our challenge is figuring out how to use those most effectively. MSDF So how do you measure a concept as broad as brain health? Dr. Vollmer The easiest measure is actually the size of the brain. One of the unfortunate consequences of multiple sclerosis – as is true with hypertension, cardiovascular disease, strokes, dementia, and other things – is that neurons are dying. So MS is not just a disease of myelin; it's a disease of the entire brain, and it affects neurons and cells called astrocytes and cells called oligodendrocytes that make up the bulk of what the brain is. The result of of loss of these neurons is the brain has less and less flexibility in terms of shifting function around from areas that are not working well to areas that are working well. That ability to switch, or shift function around, is something that we do automatically throughout life. Every time we bump our head and get a little bit of bruising in the brain the brain can compensate by shifting function around. This is the same issue that the NFL is dealing with with its football players and mothers are worried about with their kids in contact sports. The problem of multiple sclerosis is that most of the disease activity is actually below the radar – it's not presenting as relapses – and you don't see it unless you're doing regular MRIs, or you're doing a a more modern MRI technique called a volumetric MRI where you can actually measure the three-dimensional volume of the brain. And we do that routinely in studies, and we know that in MS the brain is shrinking at a rate of about six times faster than the normal healthy controls. That's the fundamental problem in terms of maximizing lifelong activity is we're losing brain function too fast in the early phase of the disease. MSDF So how does this concept help guide treatment? Dr. Vollmer Well it turns out that there actually are three components to a treatment plan that wants to maximize brain health over a lifetime. The first one in multiple sclerosis is obviously to try to prevent further damage to the brain by using the immunological therapies that we have in the most effective way possible. And that's a a bit challenging, but the fact is we have a lot of opportunities now that we've never had before. And this is an issue for the medical field. The second aspect is it turns out that more and more research – including that presented here at the American Academy of Neurology meeting – suggests that if you exercise and are intellectually and physically active that increases your brain reserve. It does that because as you fire neurons by doing something – learning a language, volunteering, going to church, reading, whatever – that causes the nerve cells to put out new branches called neurites. And those neurites randomly connect with other neurons in the vicinity. If you do something to activate that pathway, then you make it permanent. If you don't do something to activate that pathway, it breaks automatically within 24 to 48 hours. So you need to be active on a daily basis really to try to maximize those connections. And what you're doing you're just creating this three-dimensional network of connections between nerve cells that gives the brain the flexibility of shifting function around. And it was reported at this meeting – and it's been reported in the literature a number of times – that people who are intellectually active actually have less disability controlling for all other factors than people who are not intellectually active. And we now know that that's also true by being physically active. And again, this cuts across multiple diseases, but it's just as important in MS as it is in other ones. And then, the third factor is diet. The reason for that is not that there's a specific MS diet; there isn't. But we know that if you develop other dietary related diseases, that substantially increases your risk of disability from MS. So for example, just developing diabetes almost doubles your risk of being disabled from MS than just having MS alone. So just having high blood pressure, just being overweight or obese increases your risk of disability. So that means if we want to maximize lifelong outcomes then we prevent injury by using the drugs as effectively as we can; we get people to exercise and be intellectually active to create more connections with brain, create more cognitive and brain reserve; and we also help them develop a healthy lifestyle from a nutrition aspect, as well, to prevent them from developing other diseases that would compromise neurological health.  MSDF Well all of this sounds interesting, but it sounds completely obvious to me. What is controversial about this subject? Dr. Vollmer There are two things. One is that the medical profession is just now beginning to evolve in the direction of trying to think about global health and chronic diseases. Primary care physicians have been thinking about this for some time, in general, but in terms of applying it to chronic diseases this is a a relatively new concept, and how to do it is still a challenge. The second reason is that regulatory agencies, in other countries, and then in this country, health insurance organizations, prevent us from doing this. So for example, in early phase disease for patients who don't carry a virus called JC virus, a drug called natalizumab or a drug called fingolimod might be actually be the best drugs for them. But the insurance companies, even Medicare and Medicaid, make it very difficult for us to use them in the patients. They tend to approve the old drugs first because they perceive them as cheaper usually through sweetheart deals made by the private insurance companies or just because of concerns of cost on the part of Medicaid. And they prevent us from using more effective drugs earlier; they don't understand this concept of preserving brain volume and brain health in terms of trying to maximize lifelong outcomes. MSDF Is there any proof though that starting with fingolimod or natalizumab – starting with the "heavy hitters" – will prevent the the long, slow progression? Dr. Vollmer Yes and no. The problem is the gold standard would be a 50-year study looking at 10,000 people. That's never going to be done partly because the target is constantly moving as new therapies come into the marketplace, but also it's just not practical. However, having said that, published both in the peer reviewed literature and at the American Academy of Neurology meeting are a number of relatively large studies done at centers around the world – most not funded by drug companies – that have reported that patients on fingolimod or natalizumab are significantly better off after two years of treatment than patients using interferons or glatiramer acetate. And at this meeting, specifically they compared in an open-label way patients who were started on fingolimod versus patients started on interferons or GA or switched, and again they showed a 50% reduction in relapse rate. And in the literature for natalizumab, there have been reports since 2010 of the fact that if you're treating relapsing MS patients over two years period of time, on average, that group is improving in function. And that includes fatigue, cognition, mobility, employability. So with highly effective therapies, we do have evidence, substantial evidence, that slowing down brain volume is important, and that results in better function and often resolution of symptoms – patients actually get better on these highly effective therapies. And we've not seen that with interferons and glatiramer in most patients. MSDF As a physician, can you recommend strategies for making the argument to third party payers? Dr. Vollmer Yes. There is a lot of research data that proves that brain volume or gray matter volumes or the number of neurons that you have in your brain is the most powerful predictor of what's going to happen to you in terms of disability over your lifetime, and this is not an arguable point. However, regulators tend to look at relapse rate reduction and gadolinium-enhancing MRI lesion reduction, which are not very good at predicting long-term outcomes. So we need to reeducate health insurers and third-party payers that if you really want to optimize patients' lifelong health you need to make the investment upfront in highly effective therapies to prevent them from developing more disability. We know there are a number of studies reporting that total healthcare costs are less if you're using highly effective therapy like natalizumab or fingolimod over time than they are with interferon and and glatiramer acetate. So this has been published in many different ways; there's more than a dozen papers in the literature on this. The problem is is that any one study is relatively small, and it's easy to criticize it. But the field needs to step back and look at the overall literature. And the overall literature is consistent; we consistently demonstrate that if there's an effect the effect is in favor of using more effective therapies as early as possible in the disease course.  MSDF Aside from brain volumetrics, what are what are some other good ways of measuring brain health? Dr. Vollmer Well you can look at the number of what are called T2 lesions that are developing on the MRI; so your neurologist can look at that, and they can compare you to other patients of a similar age and try to determine are you on the good end of the spectrum or or the more worse end of the spectrum. You can look at what's called T1 black holes; it's a typical MRI measure that's always done. But T1 black holes are more correlated with worse long-term outcomes, and so if you have more T1 black holes you really should be thinking about being on a more effective therapy. And certainly, if somebody is on a therapy and they continue to have any evidence of disease activity – which means a relapse, a change in the MRI or progressive disability – they should probably be thinking about being on a more effective therapy, and they should be discussing that with their physician.  MSDF I'm a little surprised that you didn't mention any cognitive measures. Dr. Vollmer It’s only because I assume automatically that they're very important, and, in fact, most of the data on brain reserve is focused on cognitive function. However, I would argue that the same principles apply for mobility, for sensation, for vision, for creativity. And so, MS is a disease of the central nervous system, so it attacks the very core of what it is to be human. We tend to focus on the bipedal nature of human behavior, but that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is maintaining your interaction with your family, with your friends, with your profession, being able to progress and learn, etc. We can deal with mobility issues, but we don't have a way to recover cognitive function yet. MSDF Are you yourself conducting any studies in this area? Dr. Vollmer Yes. We have a number of studies; we actually have 28 clinical studies going on in MS. But two of the ones that I think are very relevant to this particular issue is we have been funded to be able to look at the changes on MRI in patients that have been on either fingolimod or natalizumab for two years or longer. And we're comparing them to age matched healthy controls. And what we're asking is is the rate of brain volume change, which all of us suffer, but is the rate of that change in those patients now similar to what it is in healthy controls versus patients who have MS? And as I said, we know that the percent change in brain volume for healthy people is about 0.1% per year; in MS it averages about 0.6% per year. So we're we're doing this study now to see the patients who are doing well – they're coming into the clinic, they're saying I'm feeling good, I feel like I'm as good or better than I was last year – is their brain now normalized in terms of its very modest loss of brain volume over time as a result of normal aging?  MSDF And you said there was a second one that that is particularly relevant. Dr. Vollmer The second one is is to take and ask patients, it's called patient reported outcomes – where we actually ask the patient about how they're doing in cognition, how they're doing with energy, how they're doing with mobility, how they're doing with sexual function, you know, the things that are important to us – and we're asking how that is changing over time on these therapies, and we're trying to correlate that back with what's happening to their brain MRI in terms of brain volume.  MSDF Dr. Vollmer, I've come to the end of my prepared questions. Is there anything else you'd like to add or any questions I didn't ask that I should have asked? Dr. Vollmer Two things. As I said, one is it's very important for patients and the healthcare profession to really begin to understand that MS is a disease of the entire central nervous system, and its impact on neurons is actually the most important aspect of this of this disease. The second one is that healthcare providers working with MS patients and MS patients and families need to advocate to the healthcare system to allow healthcare providers to use the most effective therapy that works best for that patient based on individual assessments of safety and efficacy.  MSDF Well thank you very much. Dr. Vollmer Thank you. Appreciate the interest.  [transition music] Host – Dan Keller Well that’s it for Episode One of Multiple Sclerosis Discovery. This podcast was produced by the MS Discovery Forum—MSDF--the premier source of independent news and information on MS research, Robert Finn, executive editor. MSDF is part of the non-profit Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis. Robert McBurney is our President and CEO, and Hollie Schmidt is the Vice President of Scientific Operations.  MSDiscovery.org aims to focus attention on what is known and not yet known about the causes of MS and related conditions, their pathological mechanisms, and potential ways to intervene. By communicating this information in a way that builds bridges among different disciplines, we hope to open new routes toward significant clinical advances. We’re interested in your opinions. Please join the discussion on one of our online forums or send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to editor@msdiscovery.org.  [outro music]