Hope for thousands battling MS as scientists find brain injections can stave off damage from illness

There is hope for a treatment for people with progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) through a stem cell injection into the brain.

It is estimated that more than 130,000 people in the UK have MS, with almost 7,000 diagnosed each year.

The vast majority of people have relapsing-remitting MS, which causes occasional attacks of new or worsening symptoms that can then resolve for years.

But about two-thirds of these people eventually develop secondary progressive MS, where their symptoms gradually worsen over time, often leading to muscle weakness, severe fatigue, vision problems and wheelchair use.

Now scientists have found a safe treatment that can interrupt the devastating disease and protect the brain from further damage in the long term.

It is an injection of stem cells from the brain, which appears to counteract the immune system’s attack on the brain and spinal cord, the cause of MS.

These stem cells were injected directly into the brains of 15 people with secondary MS, recruited from two hospitals in Italy.

All of these people had a high degree of disability, and most required a wheelchair, but no one became disabled or saw an increase or flare-up of symptoms for more than a full year after receiving the injection.

Secondary progressive MS can cause problems with thinking, learning and planning, but such thinking problems did not worsen in people in the year after the injection, based on a battery of tests including remembering lists of words.

Professor Stefano Pluchino from the University of Cambridge, who co-led the research, added: ‘We urgently need to develop new treatments for secondary progressive MS, and I am cautiously excited about our findings, which are a step in the direction of the development of cell therapy. for the treatment of MS.’

Dr. Luca Peruzzotti-Jametti, co-author from the University of Cambridge, said: ‘This was a small study to determine whether this treatment is safe.

‘But people with secondary progressive MS see their independence slipping away from them day after day, with only one drug, which is not available to everyone and can only help relieve symptoms.

‘The hope of a treatment that can prevent the condition from getting worse would be very important, so we will test this in many more people next time, including hopefully patients in Britain.’

In MS, the immune system attacks the protective layer of proteins and fatty acids – called the myelin sheath – that protects the nerves that transmit signals from the brain.

The myelin sheath becomes damaged and scarred, disrupting brain signals such as those to the muscles needed for walking.

However, stem cells, which have the ability to become virtually any type of cell in the body, can prevent immune cells from causing this harmful damage.

They also produce natural chemicals that prevent scarring of the myelin sheath and help it regenerate.

Adults do not have a good supply of these stem cells in their brains because they have already been used up and converted into normal brain cells.

But unborn babies, whose brains are not yet fully developed, have many of the precious stem cells.

The stem cells used in the study were donated by the family of an unborn baby after a miscarriage.

They were injected directly into the cerebrospinal fluid in which the brain is located through brain surgery under anesthesia.

The MS patients in the study had no serious adverse side effects and there were no deaths, although one patient suffered a seizure as a result of the brain surgery.

Steroids and immunosuppressants that were required in addition to the stem cells also led to temporary psychosis in one patient and short-lived infections in several others.

However, the researchers hope to overcome this in the future by using people’s own stem cells for their treatment – by reprogramming their skin cells into brain stem cells using a special laboratory technique.

MRI scans provided further evidence that the stem cells had stopped MS, as suggested by people who did not get worse over a full year.

Those given higher doses of stem cells showed a marked reduction in swelling in the brain – likely due to anti-inflammatory molecules released by the cells that counteract the damage done by the immune system.

Volunteers who received higher doses of stem cells also had higher levels of fatty acids in their spinal fluid, suggesting their brains functioned more effectively.

Because the volunteers were so disabled, more evidence is needed to ensure that using stem cells actually makes MS worse.

Researchers also want to understand whether stem cells can help regenerate brains damaged by MS.

But the research, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, was described as ‘very exciting’ by Caitlin Astbury of the MS Society. She said: ‘These results show that special stem cells injected into the brain are safe and well tolerated in people with secondary progressive MS.

‘They also suggest that this treatment approach could even stabilize the progression of disability.’

Dr. Aravinthan Varatharaj, clinical lecturer in neurology at the University of Southampton, said: ‘Although this study showed that patients did not experience significant disease progression after treatment, there are other possible explanations for this, and this was not a controlled study.’