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DNA Vaccine May Treat Multiple Sclerosis

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Aug 15, 2007 12:24 AM
from the good-for-what-ails-you dept.
Biotech Science
GSASoftware writes "Multiple sclerosis is a serious, as-yet incurable neurological disease which causes blindness, paralysis and other serious symptoms. In a new development, a neuroimmunology researcher in Montreal has developed a therapeutic DNA vaccine. The cause of the disease is not fully understood, but it appears to be auto-immune. If a DNA vaccine can be an effective therapy for this auto-immune disease, is it possible that DNA vaccines could treat other auto-immune diseases like Crohn's, eczema, and others?"
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  • Always a possibility (Score:3, Insightful)

    by charleylc (928180) on Wednesday August 15 2007, @12:51AM (#20233495)
    There's always the possibility that it *could* work for other auto-immune diseases.
    It's kind of mute point, though, to ask such a hypothetical question when the original story is about a new therapeutic DNA vaccine that only produces "beneficial changes" with "periods of remission".
    While this is a huge step forward, it is far from being introduced into the mainstream medical community for mass use. TFA states that it is in the early stages of being studied.
    Although the article does say that it's possible that it could be developed for other auto-immune diseases, I think it's a little preemptive to start asking such hypothetical questions when the target disease for which the drug is being developed isn't even out of the test stage.

    • Re:Always a possibility (Score:5, Informative)

      by dberstein (648161) <daniel@ba s e geo.com> on Wednesday August 15 2007, @01:14AM (#20233575) Homepage Journal
      I suffer from MS; the last I heard of a vaccine was last year: they shut the study after a couple of patients died.

      This is are very interesting and promising news for me. Perhaps in a couple of years I won't need my daily anti-fatigue pills, weekly interferon beta 1a shots, and those occasional hospital corticoid shock treatments. Probably I'll never recover for the disabilities I've already got, but at least I won't develop any further because of MS!

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by dmpyron (1069290)
        I have a friend with MS. She goes in once every 4 weeks for an infusion of Tysabri. It's supposed to be the next miracle. It's prevented the formation of new lesions in over 90% of the test subjects. The previous med was beta interferon, IIRC.

        Tysabri was pulled from the market in 2004 after two of the test subjects suffered from some sort of disorder that "turned their brains to mush" (Sarah's words). A further trial had no adverse results. She's had no new lesions and is currently asymptomatic.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by gold (10420)
        You and others suffering from MS, other autoimmune disorders, or even cancer may wish to research low-dose Naltrexone treatment: http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/index.htm [lowdosenaltrexone.org] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_dose_naltrexone [wikipedia.org].
          • They could have been cured of the first disease, but died of something else. Like if you had a septic earlobe and were decapitated.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by tfoss (203340)

      It's kind of mute point
      *putting on grammar/diction nazi hat*
      No, it's a moot point [wsu.edu].
      -Ted
      • Parent is not off-topic. Knowing how to use words when making your case is most certainly relevant information. Using words improperly does a great disservice to an otherwise strong post. Correcting misconceptions (particularly "mute point" which many, many people say) allows people to be taken seriously. If you said this at a symposium or panel, you'd hear giggles throughout the room.

  • Well, I am holding my breath (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lordvalrole (886029) on Wednesday August 15 2007, @01:02AM (#20233533)
    My mother has MS and I know others as well that have it. It is such a horrible disease. I hope this research continues and is a viable option and soon. Nothing is worse than seeing a parent or loved one just lose their abilities over a few years.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by NoobixCube (1133473)
      My mother has MS as well, and there's only so much Betaferon can do to slow the pace. Just five years ago she was only a little night-blind, as many healthy people are. In that time she's lost her sight totally twice, and now she's losing all colour vision, and has no peripheral vision. And that's the least of the problems MS is causing her.

  • MS anecdonte (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ookabooka (731013) on Wednesday August 15 2007, @01:47AM (#20233657)
    First off, IANAD, though both my mother and aunt are. My aunt has fairly severe MS, she can't walk, lost some dexterity in her left arm, etc. What is interesting is that my mother is an identical twin, and doesn't suffer from MS at all. They did some experimental treatments utilizing this unique situation, one of which was some sort of combination of Chemo therapy and a bone marrow transplant. Does this vaccine simple get rid of some "risk factors" in the DNA? Obviously I'd find it hard to believe that there is a direct relationship between DNA and MS. . .
    • Why couldn't it be genetic? by your logic all identical twins would die of the exact same things. environment can be the trigger for many illnesses.
      • Well in that case the genetic factor are risk-factors and not definitive. There are many genetic diseases where you WILL develop symptoms if your DNA is a certain way. I'm saying I don't think MS has such a direct link to DNA based on my anecdotal evidence. That is why I'm questioning exactly what this "DNA vaccine" is doing.

    • No it does not - how it works (Score:5, Insightful)

      by backslashdot (95548) on Wednesday August 15 2007, @02:25AM (#20233783)
      Multiple sclerosis is when your immune system attacks a nerve's covering called myelin. What the vaccine does is it gets the immune system to stop targetting the myelin by causing a reduction in the T-cells that attack it. If it works as they say, and have demonstrated, it only reduces the number of T-cells that target the myelin protein, not other stuff.
      • Yeah that makes sense. Thats probably why they nuked my aunt's bone marrow and replaced it with my mothers. If I recall correctly it did stop it for a while but ended up being more of a stopgap than a viable treatment. I remember my mother telling me something like if they did that on a normal person the replacement marrow could have aggravated the auto-immune bit more but since they were identical twins there was no fear of rejection.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Thyrteen (1084963)
        For those who don't know, myelin is a coating that coats the axon of a nerve, promoting signal propogation to the dendrites of the next nerve. Lack of this coating is also known to lead to things such as high impulsivity (This myelin coating does not entire form until at least mid-twenties, and is at least partly responsible for the way we act as kids / teenagers).

    • "DNA vaccine" (Score:5, Informative)

      by Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358) on Wednesday August 15 2007, @03:04AM (#20233913) Homepage Journal
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccination [wikipedia.org]

      DNA is the active ingredient of the vaccine, if they mean what people usually mean by "DNA vaccine".

      To vaccinate against a pathogen, you'd take some gene from it that codes for a surface protein, inject that DNA into muscle cells, let them express it and produce the protein, and the immune system would learn to react.

      Which leaves plenty of confusion, since the goal of MS therapy would be to turn off the immune response to myelin, not to create an immune response.

      This isn't about gene therapy.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "What is interesting is that my mother is an identical twin, and doesn't suffer from MS at all."

      It is thought that there are triggers for this. I had a friend that made it to 35 before MS started to take place...ended up getting mono and it was only after that that she start to see problems. There are doctors that say the epstein-barr virus is one of the MAJOR triggers for this disease.

      For me, I have another auto-immune disease. Similar in reaction in the immune response, but attacking different parts...

    • Re:MS anecdonte (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 0123456789 (467085) <h_m_dyson@yahoo.com> on Wednesday August 15 2007, @08:02AM (#20235281)
      I remember a radio programme about identical twins a while ago. One of the things that fascinated me was that although identical twins have identical DNA, their active genes are not identical. Over time, the genes that are active vary between the two twins, as shown by comparing the gene sequences of pairs of identical twins at different ages. The variation was called something like 'Epygenetic modification'. Hopefully someone who knows more about this can comment?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by damn_registrars (1103043)
        The term you are looking for is "epigenetics".

        It generally refers to gene regulation via mechanisms beyond DNA sequence. A good example of this is what is called "x chromosome silencing" in all women. While women have two equivalent X chromosomes, one is "permanently silenced" during very early development. This ensures that all of the woman's cells will read X chromosome genes from the same chromosome. No pattern for this has been demonstrated, to the best of my knowledge (as far as favoring paternal
    • system gets screwed up, either through an inheritable pre-disposition to environmental triggers or through the action of those environment triggers.

      I am a not a doctor but I DO have MS.

      MS may be a syndrome for a whole bunch of DNA/RAN transcription errors which can either be ignored because the triggers never occur or which can really fuck up your life by transforming what would normally just be a sneeze (an allergic reaction) into a life-threatening episode.

      I never get the flu, I get episodes of MS instead

  • therapeutic DNA vaccine - Gene therapy you dolts! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Good grief, why don't they just get on with it and call it gene therapy. All this 'therapeutic DNA vaccine' is it because you think people will be scared by something genetic?

    ZOMG! zombie mutant viruses NO WAY!
  • I surely hope that this vaccine is proven safe, and is available in the USA VERY SOON!!!

    I have a close relative with MS and know several others..

  • The article reports the findings from 30 patients - meaning that the trial was testing only whether the therapy was safe. The authors' note that most patients did not progress (to develop worse disease) is only parenthetical, though the information can be used to estimate how many patients will have to be tested to determine efficacy. Frankly, I don't see a solid rational for a therapeutic mechanism, but if it works, great, and we'll learn something about MS and immunology in figuring out how it works.

    Ther
  • This is very good news if it really works out. There have been many treatments claiming the Holy Grail before, but did nothing much except for the side effects. MS is arguably one of the worst illnesses around. My older brother suffered from it from the age of 19 until he died at the age of 32. The illness itself might not be the worst, but rather the knowledge that it will never get better is what is so hard. My brother graduated tax law with honors, but he had to stop working after a year because of his d
  • Wouldn't a "DNA vaccine" be something that keeps you from getting DNA? Like the way the Polio vaccine keeps you from getting Polio?

  • Cool work (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pedrito (94783) on Wednesday August 15 2007, @08:15AM (#20235407) Homepage
    I haven't read the details of the study, but here's what's basically going on, from what I can tell so far... MS is a disease in which the immune system attacks the myelin in Schwann cells. Myelin is an "electrical insulator" in the cell membrane of Schwann cells. Schwann cells wrap around the axons of nerve cells in segments and the electrical signal basically jumps across the Schwann cell segments, increasing the speed of conduction. In MS, the body's immune system sees myelin as a foreign invader and attacks it and slowly consumes the myelin, eventually making the nerves non-functional.

    The vaccine is actually a virus. It doesn't say specifically in the article, but I suspect it's an adenovirus because they're pretty good for this kind of thing. The DNA sequence for the Myelin basic protein (MBP) is encoded into the virus. There are actually several variants of MBP and I'm curious if they're introducing just one variant or multiple variants. Anyway, MBP is involved in myelination of nerves. I don't think this part is well understood, but in studies of mice where the gene for myelin basic protein has been removed (mice with a certain gene or genes removed are called knockout mice), they develop diseases similar to MS.

    Anyway, it's cool stuff and this kind of technology is really the future of treatment for a lot of diseases. There's a protein called p53 that's involved in the normal regulation of cell death and when the gene for P53 gets mutated, it can lead to cancer. p53 is implicated in roughly half of all cancers. One possible treatment is to come up with an virus with a normal p53 gene encoded in it and use that to turn the cancer cells back into normal cells that die properly. There are a host of other genetic based diseases where this kind of thing could be useful as well.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by drjzzz (150299)

      I haven't read the details of the study, but here's what's basically going on, from what I can tell so far...
      X SNIP X
      The vaccine is actually a virus.

      Wrong. A poster describing the work is available for download from the company, Bayhill Therapeutics, here [bayhilltherapeutics.com]. The therapeutic is not a virus but rather a relatively simple, circular DNA (plasmid) of about 3,500 nucleotides with a promoter to drive transcription (make mRNA) and a polyadenylation site to stabilize the mRNA. Otherwise, the DNA has just the minimum to grow and select in bacteria (origin of replication and antibiotic resistance gene that is inactive in humans). Once injected into an animal, s

  • Directions in MS research (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    GSASoftware wrote:
    > The cause of the disease is not fully understood, but it appears to
    > be auto-immune.

    It is auto-immune; there is no question about that, and there hasn't
    been for a few decades now.

    I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2000; I got my first
    symptoms when I was 19 years old while I was overseas (imagine waking
    up one morning with half your vision gone in one eye). My mother has
    MS too. That there is a genetic factor has always been
    known. Typically, if a close relative has MS, you hav

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jesup (8690) *
      You may be referring to the very recent study of a large number of people (thousands) in the UK using "gene chips" to identify common loci of different genetic diseases. MS apparently shares some susceptibility genes/loci with other auto-immune diseases, such as type-1 (juvenile) diabetes and Crohnes disease (sp). See Science News, or MIT Technology Review I think.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by janrinok (846318)
      Your comment has been tagged as Funny. I hope that is how you intended it to be (and the title suggests that you did), because otherwise you are being totally ignorant and offensive. I have a loved one who is suffering from MS. She hasn't done anything to 'deserve it'. It isn't caused by having loose morals. Its effects, however, are devastating. Her life and my own, as well as the lives of many members of our family, have been changed as a result of the disease. Our home has had to be modified so tha
      • I'm unclear as to why you took so much offense to the GP's attempted humor.

        His joke itself, of course, was not funny. It's a play on the wording of the title. Instead of parsing it as a DNA vaccine against MS, he parsed "DNA Vaccine" as a vaccine against DNA. The attempted humor being, if you don't want to be "infected" with DNA, use a condom.

        You somehow interpreted his joke to imply that MS was caused by unprotected sex. I didn't read the post that way, and anyhow, I have never heard anyone suggest, ei

            • I'm not in Germany, nor am I German.
              Then you've no excuse for being such a homourless dickhead, have you?
              • Ah, such incisive wit! Each word crafted to cause the maximum mirth in the reader. You must be really proud of your contribution to this thread. Your comment has certainly added an invaluable and intelligent insight into the problems that medical science is currently experiencing. Now piss off and let the adults have a discussion.
          • Change the record, your grumbling about AC's is getting really tedious. Here I am, all logged in - what are you going to do - beat me up after class? Grow the fuck up already.
    • I cannot really say it is funny, a friend of mine has this disease, I must say it is one of the most terrible things I have ever seen. What happens is that your physical condition goes gradually down (so does your mental condition to some degrees in the later stages)
      this is endless suffering for decades.

      I am not sure which disease is the worst, but MS is definitely a candidate for worst disease!

      • Thank you. As you will have noticed from my posts above, I also cannot see a funny side to this. If this had been an article about CPUs, power supplies or YRO, there would have been a serious discussion. As it is, many seem to think that such diseases are simply a cause for jokes. My family do laugh about MS, otherwise we would not get through some days, but we do not laugh at the sufferer but at the disease's effects. Many comments in the posts seem to think it is a sexually transmitted disease - whic

        • My family do laugh about MS

          I'm not sure how this is possible.

          Like I said before, I considered MS from all angles and failed to find any opening for humor. Not even in the context of a cure having been found and looking back on the challenge of the time.

          It's usually funny to look back at some challenge you faced and see it as humorous. Example: "Remember that time we were in Vietnam and we were looking for... which Wat was it? I don't even remember... anyhow, we got out at the bus station and there was this map of the town, but it

          • I fully agree, not many aspects of MS have a humorous element. But we have managed to find laughter from time to time. The best jokes are the ones told by the sufferer about the problems they are experiencing. For example, the sufferer's loss of balance can cause an effect similar to that seen in drunken people. In this case, the sufferer made light of the issue by pointing out that we were all drinking beer at a BBQ to achieve a similar effect, so look how much she was saving in both time and money! O

        • Many comments in the posts seem to think it is a sexually transmitted disease
          In a way it is - as are hemophilia, sickle cell anemia and ginger hair.
          • No, there is no proven genetic link. We have gone back 4 generations and there is no trace of MS in the family history. That hardly makes it look a convincing case for a genetic disease. In fact, no-one actually knows yet what causes it. They can see its effects on the body, and they can view the symptoms that people exhibit, but they are still at a loss as to the cause and cure.

            • No, there is no proven genetic link.
              It's not disproven either.

              We have gone back 4 generations and there is no trace of MS in the family history. That hardly makes it look a convincing case for a genetic disease.
              Unless your family is the only one to ever exhibit this disease, that proves nothing. Not really a huge sample size, is it?
      • That's part of the problem though. Teaching abstinence is all well and good if you live in some kind of dream world where people only have sex after they're married. Humans are sexual creatures, we're hard wired to have sex and we're going to do it since the survival of the species relies on it. As my parents did for me I will do for both of my daughters, education about the safer ways to have sex and the joy as well as the dangers of it. I'm a dad so teaching my girls about sex isn't going to be fun fo
        • "Both my wife and I had sex before we were married with others and with eachother and we're much happier as a result,"

          So you're suggesting the only way to be happy sexually is to be promiscuous? or try each other out before you get married? I have to disagree.. the male and female genitalia go quite well with each other and i don't see anything you could learn in the bedroom about your partner that you wouldn't learn through dating for a number of years...

          2 people who are virgins who get married (and then h
          • Oh christ, this is some crap. Tell me exactly how someone can be statistically happier? Before I quote Mark Twain on this one, why do people enjoy basing their life decisions on statistics? Seriously, do people really become abstinent because they feel like it has an 'empirically demonstrated potential to decrease the chances of my unhappiness'? Does anyone besides me realize how absurdly stupid this logic is? How do you even quantify this?
            The biggest problem I find with your post is that it assumes everyon
          • Sounds like a total cop-out justification for not being charming enough to get laid. Dude, wash your face more, come out of your parents basement more often, and make an effort to be a little more social to the ladies. It really isn't that hard - you have hormones and instinct working FOR you as stated in the earlier post. The desire to reproduce is one of the most common "hard wired" instincts in all animals. Humans are the only animals stupid enough to try and go against nature by promoting "abstinence".

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mbowersox (953040)

      Can't you just get one?
      Sclerosis = Scar Tissue

      Multiple Sclerosis = Multiple areas of scarring in the CNS (Brain, Spinal Cord, Optic Nerves)
    • I'm sorry to hear that you have become cynical.

      One thing that is "nice" about MS, is that there is a large enough population of affected people that a lot of research is being done. This is compounded by the cross-application of many therapies between MS and Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, etc. At least it isn't some obscure disorder that doesn't get any research at all.

      Biogen Idec definitely has a great thing going from a balance sheet perspective, I'll grant you. But they know that if some
    • My mom has had MS for about 15 years now -- for the last 10 or so years, she's been taking daily injections of Copaxone, which seems to have stopped the disease in its tracks. Fortunately, dad has good insurance -- the Copaxone runs about $2000 per month.

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