DNA Vaccine May Treat Multiple Sclerosis

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?"

Always a possibility

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

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:

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 w

Re:

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].

Re:

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:

It's kind of mute point

*putting on grammar/diction nazi hat*
No, it's a moot point [wsu.edu].
-Ted

Re:

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,

Well, I am holding my breath

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:

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 visi

MS anecdonte

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. . .

Re:

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.

Re:

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

No it does not - how it works

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.

Re:

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 somet

Re:

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 entir

"DNA vaccine"

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:

"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

Re:MS anecdonte

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:

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

Not DNA per say but some coding of the immune

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

therapeutic DNA vaccine - Gene therapy you dolts!

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!

!!! Yay

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..

safe?, maybe, effective? too early to tell

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

Good news

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 ag

Confusing terminology

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

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:

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 transcr

Directions in MS research

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

Re:

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,

Re:

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

Why such offense?

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

Re:

I'm not in Germany, nor am I German.

Then you've no excuse for being such a homourless dickhead, have you?

Re:

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 scienc

Re:

Now piss off and let the adults have a discussion.

Why don't you try and make me, faggot-knickers?

Re:

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.

Re:

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 la

Re:

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 a

Re:

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 b

Re:

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

Re:

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.

Re:

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 i

Re:

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

Re:

So how do you substantiate your claim that it is a sexually transmitted disease?

Re:

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

Re:

"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 disag

Re:

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 lik

Re:

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

Re:

Can't you just get one?

Sclerosis = Scar Tissue

Multiple Sclerosis = Multiple areas of scarring in the CNS (Brain, Spinal Cord, Optic Nerves)

Re:

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

Re:

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.