My trip to Lucerne and the Charcot Project

A few weeks ago I was invited to give a lecture at the annual Swiss MS Society meeting on 'The Charcot Project' and the rationale behind using anti-viral drugs to treat MS.



As promised my slides from the meeting; they should be self-explanatory:






The Charcot Project is an initiative that Professor Gold and I launched about 5 years ago to tackle MS from a different perspective; a perspective that MS is caused by a virus and to tackle MS we need to start doing treatment trials using anti-virals. The two leading viral contenders are EBV and HERVs.  If you have any queries about the slides please feel free to ask. 

In this presentation, I stress the point that I have made several times before that MRI activity (new Gd-enhancing lesions) and relapses are not MS, the disease. If they were the disease they would predict MS outcomes whether or not you are on a DMT. The data indicates they only predict outcomes when you are on a DMT. Based on Prentice criteria of what constitutes a surrogate end-point for a disease both relapses and MRI activity fail. 

I then review the observation that changes occur weeks to months in the white matter before a new focal lesion occurs. This would indicate something is happening in the brain of pwMS prior to inflammation ('Field Hypothesis'). This may explain the Prineas lesion, i.e. oligodendrocyte apoptosis without overt inflammation. The million dollar question is what is killing the oligodendrocyte? 

I then review the epidemiology evidence supporting EBV and possibly HERVs as the viral aetiology of MS. I complete the lecture with some experiments that need to be done to prove that EBV is the cause of MS. Simple? I wish! Trying to get funding for studying the viral cause of MS is very difficult and slow, but we will get there, eventually. 

ProfG    

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