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

[charleylc (928180)]

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

[dberstein (648161)]

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!

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[tfoss (203340)]

It's kind of mute point

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

Well, I am holding my breath

[lordvalrole (886029)]

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.

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[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

[ookabooka (731013)]

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. . .

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[timmarhy (659436)]

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.

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[ookabooka (731013)]

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

[backslashdot (95548)]

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.

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[ookabooka (731013)]

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.

"DNA vaccine"

[Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358)]

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:MS anecdonte

[0123456789 (467085)]

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?

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[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

therapeutic DNA vaccine - Gene therapy you dolts!

[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!

!!! Yay

[robpoe (578975)]

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

[drjzzz (150299)]

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

Good news

[smooc (59753)]

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

Cool work

[Pedrito (94783)]

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.

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[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

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[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

Why such offense?

[Slashdot Parent (995749)]

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

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[MemoryDragon (544441)]

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!

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[janrinok (846318)]

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

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[chuckymonkey (1059244)]

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

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[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)