In the News

As reported by the Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal, February 18, 2008.

Stanford Researchers ID Therapy Targets For MS Treatment

By American City Business Journals Inc.

Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine said Sunday that they have identified therapy targets that could lead to personalized treatments for multiple sclerosis patients.

The team said it cataloged all of the brain-tissue proteins that they found were distinct to three discrete stages of multiple sclerosis.

"This is a gold mine," said Dr. Lawrence Steinman, professor of neurology and neurological sciences. "Knowing what proteins are most important at a discrete stage of the multiple sclerosis process is the first step toward being able to 'personalize' treatment."

Steinman, whose team worked with researchers at the University of Connecticut Health Center, is one of two senior authors of an article published in the new issue of the journal Nature.

In the study, the team found many unexpected proteins involved in the disease progression. When they tested drugs that block two of these proteins in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis, the mice improved dramatically.

"If our hypothesis is correct, the findings can be directly applied to patients," said Dr. May Han, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and co-first author of the paper. She emphasized that researchers are still very early in the process of being able to tailor drug therapies for humans.

In multiple sclerosis, the immune system launches an attack against the myelin sheath surrounding nerve cells, causing them to misfire. The resulting variety of neurological disorders affects more than 2.5 million people worldwide, according to the Multiple Sclerosis International Federation.

The work was funded by the National Institute of Health and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Others from Stanford who contributed to this study are: graduate student Jordan Price; postdoctoral scholar Shalina Ousman; Dr. William Robinson, an assistant professor of immunology and rheumatology, and Dr. Raymond Sobel, professor of pathology.